Wait for trigger during the ON time

[mycanaletto]

Hello,
I've often been interested in schedulers, I've tested several and written a few articles on my blog.
There was an interesting catch-up function in Schedy that runs under Appdaemon but is no longer maintained.

For example, I want to turn on a lamp at 18:00 with a presence constraint and turn it off at 21:00.

If I'm not home, the lamp won't turn on. On the other hand, if I come home at 19:00, it won't turn on.

Schedy monitored the interval and as soon as he realized that the constraint was lifted (presence on) he turned the lamp on if it was in the range between ON and OFF.

I've done this for my air conditioner in yaml, but I was wondering if you could introduce a notion of monitoring the active range and do this catch-up. As it is, I don't think so. Anyway, just an idea.

Bravo for your work.

lionel

[arthurdent75]

There isn’t a specific function that “forces” the state of a device, since the add-on works “by events,” meaning it checks at the turn of each minute whether there is an event scheduled for that minute and, if so, executes it.
However, it would be possible to achieve what you want with a “trick,” namely by combining a “condition template” with a “recurring” scheduler set to run every minute.
With this setup, the add-on checks every minute during the configured interval whether you are at home, and if so, it turns on the light. The drawback is that it will send the “turn on” command every minute for as long as the condition is valid, so if you manually turn the light off before 9:00 PM, it will turn it back on.

This is how it would look:

[arthurdent75]

Another idea is to create a scheduler to execute a script at 18:00 that waits for the condition to be true, with a timeout of 3 hours.

sequence:
  - wait_for_trigger:
      - trigger: zone
        entity_id: person.xxxxxx
        zone: zone.home
        event: enter
    timeout:
      hours: 3
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
    continue_on_timeout: false
  - action: light.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: light.sunset_light

If you have different lights/conditions, you can set those as parameters and pass them to the script, so you can use the same script for many schedulers.

[mycanaletto]

Thank you for your answers.
I suppose both ideas work as they stand.

For the first one, the condition where the light would turn on again isn't really a condition, as I was thinking more of monitoring a thermostat without interaction. For the light, it might be possible to set a delay or play with the condition... but it seems to me that recursion doesn't work for anything other than on/off.

The second requires a script, which I know how to do natively.

My idea, which follows yours, is rather to go towards an add-on module usable by everyone, my family for example or people who ask me in the community...

Condition template is good and lets you do what you want, but you could improve it for newbies (with time...) in GUI mode with selectors and checkboxes...

[arthurdent75]

I hear you.
By nature, this Add-on has plenty of scenarios. Through the years, I have received requests that I could not even imagine.
So I had to balance the effort of developing (for free) a feature and the number of people who would use it. Maybe a feature that I would never use for myself.
So my idea is to work on features that would give users the ability to cover more scenarios, like condition templates and parametric scripts, which, with a touch of effort and fantasy, could cover pretty much any specific case.

This is just to let you know my point of view. I'm the first one to put the word "simple" in the name, and every time I add a feature, I have the fear that it will not reflect that anymore.

Thank you for your ideas. I assure you they won't get ignored.

[mycanaletto]

I think you have a problem with the number of entities (I've just tested on my production HA where there are a lot of them...).

[arthurdent75]

I think you have a problem with the number of entities (I've just tested on my production HA where there are a lot of them...).

From the screenshot I cannot understand the issue. BTW, can you open a new issue? This is not related to this one.

[mycanaletto]

I've opened up another issue.,
You're right, the problem is quite different.