apostolakisl

seems like you could set up some mirrors at various angles and reflect the beam back and forth up the track. Challenge would be keeping them from getting out of whack.

we do have a tahoe and on occasion it isn't parked in far enough, but when parked as it is normally, the door opens without hitting the garage door. But yeah, that is a risk. Though I would expect damage from the GD to be quite a bit shy of destroying the back door. Paint scratches, maybe break the windshield wiper, but not structural damage. It should just push the door into a more shut position.

I close mine remotely if I am going to bed and forgot it open. Not a lot of toddlers in my driveway at midnight. Actually, not a lot of toddlers in my driveway ever. At least not since my son stopped being a toddler 5 years ago. I live on 7 acres and there just aren't any kids wondering around anywhere at any time on my street. I see more bobcats on my property than toddlers. And if you know anything about bobcats, you'll understand what I mean. I have trapped birds in the garage, however.

no problem. And regarding cameras, the problem with portals is the data has to go through the portal server. So there aren't really any low costs way to do this since the server needs tons of bandwidth for video. Consider getting yourself a ubiquiti usg (router) which has a very simple VPN configuration. Then you can vpn into your home network to view your cameras. VPN doesn't work for ISY since many of the devices you want to connect will not be able to establish a vpn connection first (like Amazon). Though if the only thing you wanted to do was connect a phone app to ISY, you could set your phone up with VPN, then connect your phone to vpn first followed by opening your phone app. But this is just kind of cumbersome.

OK, so it is listed on ISY as "beep", but the sound the switch actually makes is much more closely described as "chirp". It is just one of the many options for a switch, such as on/off/fast on/fast off/beep/etc. available in a program. In other words, just write a program and instead of commanding a light to turn on, you command it to beep. And if you want "chirp chirp chirp", you put three lines of code back to back. Not sure about new users and the portal on the forum. But if you just go to my.isy.io and sign up for a new account, I think it walks you through.

regarding the portal, I don't really think anything has changed as far as setting it up since its inception. The portal is just a pathway to your ISY from the internet that doesn't require opening ports on your firewall. You don't need the portal at all if you are willing to open ports. Most folks would rather not do that. The portal also facilitates using google home and amazon alexa. These two things do keep changing in the sense that more functionality gets added. Regarding using Amazon to say "shed open" or whatever. That is fine and all. But unless you have one in every room, you are likely to not hear it. The "chirp chirp chirp" is heard everywhere (assuming you have switches all over the house) and is relatively innocuous. You can do both of course.

I don't understand. Momentary means the contact closure holds for whatever you set, say 1 second. That is still a toggle. It is ISY "pushing the gdo button". Just like if I push and hold the button with my finger for 1 second. If it is currently closed, it opens, if open, it closes. Unless you have some different kind of gdo than I am aware of. I suspect that the latest and greatest that have wifi and apps probably have an api that allows for separate open/close network commands, but I don't think many of those are out in the wild, plus, I'm don't even know that they actually do that.

Most garage door openers (all as far as I know) simply issue a toggle command. So you can't do that. I have my garage doors connected to Elk zones, so the status is never wrong.

The PLM, I believe, has a queue (either that or ISY does). But either way, there is about a 1/2 second delay between multiple Insteon commands issued at the same time via ISY.

You can make your Insteon light switches inside the house "chirp". I have the blue iris node server and programmed blue iris to trigger when an object travels up my driveway. So now I hear "chirp, chirp, chirp" every time someone comes up the driveway. Then I can meet the Amazon guy at the door. Anyway, you can have an Insteon door sensor trigger ISY to make your light switches inside go chirp chirp chirp if you like. Unless you are in a dead sleep, it should wake you up. And it isn't as jarring as an actual siren would be. Also, it would not be heard by someone breaking into your shed. So you can catch them red-handed, if indeed that is what you want. If you would rather scare them away, program a bunch of lights that are visible from the shed to turn on or blink. If you are more of the shotgun kind of guy, do the chirp chirp chirp and have some fun.

I had to click through the SSL warning message.

If you run conduit all over the place you won't ever have to worry about what wire will be needed down the road. Conduit is as cheap or cheaper than a lot of wire types and allows you to future proof things like crazy. Conduit runs all over the place!! Most of them will be empty at first, maybe forever. But it is worth it. You can dead-end conduit into various wall spaces so that later on you can just pop a little hole into the sheetrock if you want to add something weird in an area. Also, I highly recommend not going with a textured wall. They charge more for the "slick" finish but it just looks so much better and if you ever patch it, you can make it perfect. Matching texture is just never quite right. Put boxes in the wall in all of your closets that you run the conduits to and use larger conduit to connect the boxes to each other. A hub and spoke arrangement. Take tons and tons and tons of pictures, and video before the sheetrock goes up so you know where everything is. 1/2 inch pvc conduit is very cheap and easy to install. A propane torch and a nice smooth fanning technique turns it into flex conduit as well. Or you can run smurf tube, but the corrugation makes it harder to pull wires down the road. Personally, I would stick with Insteon for your switches. The switches they have been making in the last couple years are very good in my opinion. They look good, feel good, sound good, and work great. Plus you can pick them up at Christmas time for half price. Security in a 2 bedroom condo probably doesn't really need an Elk. I would just go with a DSC system and use the ISY node server for it. It is way cheaper and once integrated with ISY will have most of the features an Elk would offer.

ISY is definitely different than how most other languages structure things. Someday AI will be so intuitive that we'll just be able to tell it what we want to happen and it will ask us a bunch of questions to make sure it gets it right and then it will just happen. When that day comes, we will all become very stupid, but our HA will work.

ISY evaluates time expressions at the start time and end time by default (except where they are swapped chronologically as previously discussed.) ISY evaluates "if" statements (with or without time expressions) whenever triggered. Lots of ways to be triggered include external "run if", change in status of a listed device or variable, and other stuff. ISY evaluates time statements as per common English understanding of from/to. Like, "I work the third shift, from 10pm to 6am the next day." It is obvious to anyone reading that when this person will be at work.

Oops. Yes.

Neither did I. But good to know! Had to edit my post like 4 times as I tested and eventually narrowed it all down.

Here is the the final deal. 1) from "a time" is that time every day unless otherwise stated. Like a hotel says "check-in is 3pm", they don't qualify that with "everyday" or "today" unless it isn't the same everyday. 2) To (same day/next day) means a day as defined by the calendar (meaning 12pm start time). 3) That line of code is always true between those two times no matter when you check. 4) If "to" time is after "from" time, it is false, but is NOT a trigger at either time. All of those seem pretty self evident to me except the last one, which is just the convention ISY chose so you just have to know it and write programs accordingly.

I don't follow. It doesn't say "today". That would be confusing. You can choose between everyday or just days of the week when writing the program and then it displays it as follows. Which seems to follow common English understanding in my way of thinking. I suppose you could have it say "On Everyday" for the everyday one like it says for just specific days, but to me, just saying at 8pm in a schedule means every time it is 8pm.

You shouldn't really need to access polisy except for rare configuration changes. If this is the case, I would suggest using team viewer to take over your son's computer and then from there you can access all the stuff on his network. Team viewer is free if you only use it every once in a while. I use it to fix my dad's computer a couple times per year. Team viewer doesn't require opening any ports.

@Michel KohanimIt is my recollection that if you factory reset and restore a device, the previous backlight level is not restored. Perhaps the latest firmware has this fixed, but my last experience with restoring a switch with altered backlight maybe a year ago required my manually fixing the backlight.

@larryllix @Michel Kohanim I tend to agree with Larry that a link to a login page in an email being suspicious when the email wasn't specifically solicited. I also agree that an "account" tab or "billing" tab would be a good idea. The current location is not where I would expect to find billing information.

OK, that explains it. Yes, I deleted that program a long time ago. I had some "status" programs and when the status changed at 3am because of a missed com earlier in the day, stuff would happen at 3am. Most disconcerting was the occasional turning on of the whole house music system. The WAF on that was quite low. Also, I wasn't too fond of it either.

True, but that requires you put the logic to run the else inside the "if" of your program that isn't in a conditioned folder. So what is to stop you from putting that same logic in the "if" section of your program inside a conditioned folder? For the handful of programs (for most people) using waits/repeats a simple "if time is not x" where x slightly precedes the end time of the folder. Or, if you are in the minority and use a lot of waits/repeats, one program that does a "run else" and lists out all those programs that need to terminate. Lots of ways to handle it, and like I said, when you use waits/repeats, you are going to have to do something no matter what to ensure the proper outcome.

true or false is not an action. Enabled and Disabled is the action taken based on true or false. As I mentioned, only programs with repeats/waits would ever be "abruptly" terminated. Repeats and Waits are of course also abruptly terminated by their own "if" clauses. As is always the case, you need to be careful using those statements, folder conditions or not.

I was thinking the 3am query was something people did via a program, not ISY doing it on its own. I swear I used to have a program do that, but stopped because I would get programs running at 3am if the status of a device was corrected and that status was part of a program.