Migrating from HCA to ISY - Schedules Best Practices

[rehills]

Hello everyone.

 

I am a long time Home Control Assistant (HCA) user who is migrating to an ISY-994i Pro.  HCA is a Windows based home automation program with a lot of programming power and flexibility but I've decided to abandon using a stand alone PC for home automation in favor of an ISY.  This weekend I reprogrammed all of my Insteon devices and got them working with the ISY.  To my surprise, it was a piece of cake. The last remaining task is to redevelop all of my control programs.

 

HCA had a very easy to use scheduling program to schedule tasks, programs, and on/off events based on time of day, home vs away, etc.  It looks like I can accomplish everything with the ISY but, it requires some manual effort.  Before I write a ton of programs, I wanted to find out how you all were handling home vs away, weekday vs weekend, awake vs asleep, etc.

 

I was thinking about leveraging folders like shown in the photo below.  The plan is to set variables and check state at the Home and Away folder levels.  Is that how you folks approached this topic?

 

 

 

[paulbates]

Hi, welcome to the ISY and the forums!

 

I also migrated to the ISY about a year and a half ago from another windows based solution, for the same reason.

 

What's important to the program folder structure is that it helps you. My structure is by function / room as shown in the picture as a reference, but there's no single way to do it.

 

Paul

 

 

 

[cam]

I too am looking for advice.  I just built a new home and have over 100 insteon light switches (dimmers and on/off) and several dozen motion sensors for lighting automation.  I've been able to accomplish everything I've wanted but as my programs count continues to increase dramatically I'm thinking there has to be a better way.  For instance, ever room in my house has at least one motion sensor (usually above the door to capture entry and perhaps another one in corner if the door motion isn't adequate to determine if there's occupancy.

 

Where it's getting tricky/verbose is duplicating the same code per program...  For example, if ELK zone [name] is violated and light [name] is off then turn on light [name].

 

I'd love to be able to create a function and pass device id so that when I want to alter the logic (e.g. based on time) I don't have to copy/paste it into all my programs. 

 

I'm a software engineer and it's driving me nuts that I have to copy/paste the same code into multiple programs.