Weclome to the new HS3 Event Clinic forum!

[Vincenttor]

Very good and helpful indeed.
I can't thank Randy enough for his patience and help already with my arduino trouble.

[randy]

The posts illustrating event navigation, editing and functions will be made sticky and closed. Any discussions will be in separate threads. We'll work out all of the mechanics as we go forward.

There will be a video component as well, but it may be a little while before we get there.

[rayvino]

Thanks for this, as a new user (who is not at all interested in scripting) it has been frustrating having to search all over to piece together Event information and examples.

If I can make a suggestion: Since there is no Wiki, if there is someway to keep the instructions with examples separate (and not touchable by others) from the discussions that would be best and easiest for someone to quickly go to and find out how to do something.

You could then pick out any good examples from the discussion threads to incorporate into your instruction section.

While a lot of work, Youtube videos of using events would also be great since some folks pick up learning & understanding more visually.

Thanks again to you and all the others who have been helping in this area.

[TomTom]

Oh Wow,
Good knowledge of HS event engine is key for real HS use. You've kind of been doing this already based on all your detailed and instructional post all over. Thanks for taking the time to put all this together!

[randy]

There is not necessarily a right or wrong way, nor is one way necessarily better than another. The goal of these posts will be to give you a clearer understanding of the mechanics of events.

In my opinion a "Wait" is useful and important for very tightly timed events, when you are dealing with seconds rather than minutes. An event with an action followed by another action with a delay is better when the delay is longer. There will be a post covering this, but a "Wait" within an event causes the running event to pause for each "Wait" command. An event with an action or actions that have a delay creates new "run once" delayed action events and puts them in the "Delayed Actions" group that is created on the fly. If I have an event that runs at 10:00 PM and there is an action to turn a light off after a 15 minute delay, the event runs to completion and creates a new scheduled event to turn the light off at 10:15. The new event is created in the Delayed Actions group and the box to delete the event after running in options is selected.

On your sprinklers there is essentially no difference between your two events and a single event with a 15 minute delay, so it is still two events. The advantage of using the delay would be that you could change the start time of the sprinklers or manually trigger a start, and it would automatically create the second event for 15 minutes later. With two events you would have to edit both of them if you wanted to change the time.

When you are dealing with tightly timed actions, with only a few seconds of delay, the "Wait" is clearly the choice. If you think about it the HS Event Engine runs through all of the events about once a second. If an event has to create a new Delayed Action event for each delay, then run through the events again a few times it could be sloppy enough to add a few seconds to the delay. If you create a number of Delayed Action events within a single event there is even to off chance they could run out of sequence if the timing is very tight.

Understanding how a "Wait" works as compared to a "Delay" makes it a lot easier for you to decide when to use each of them. Intuitively I wouldn't want to use a 15 minute "Wait". While I don't think it would cause a problem, I just don't like the idea of an event sitting there twiddling its thumbs for 15 minutes. While I doubt it would strain most installations and I honestly don't know how it works "under the hood", it just seems like a waste of CPU resources.

[ORNVM]

This is great! looking forward to seeing some of these topics. I have developed a number of events that "work", but i've always wondered if I was going about it the best way, hopefully this forum will clarify that for me!

I always debate whether its better (or any different) to use a wait command or just create another event to fire the second action off another trigger.

I have events both ways. For instance when door closes TTS event "door closed" then wait 2 minutes and shut off light. But then on the other hand for my sprinklers I have one event turn on and and another event scheduled 15 minutes later to turn them off... should I just add the wait and shut off to the first command, or does it even matter? I assume the wait command just schedules another event immediately when the first one fires and then terminates so scheduler is handling it all anyway, but using a wait makes me feel like an event is continuing to "run" in the background (although i doubt it is). I shy away from event's that run for a long time (horror flashbacks to radioshack X10 setups on tandy 1000's hah!)

Anyway, great idea for this forum, and I look forward to seeing your write-ups!

[clay2young]

Thanks Randy!
Your replies to me and reading your replies to others have already been a big help to me.

Now that my HS3 conversion is mostly stable with all my devices entered and functioning, writing and re-writing properly and efficiently functioning Events is my #1 activity.

[randy]

I appreciate the votes of confidence. With a football game tonight and the holidays coming it may get off to a slow start. I have a fairly clear outline started and will be assembling images and posts. Hopefully I will get in a rhythm and get this rolling soon.

While I agree that a Wiki would be another solution, I think this is going to turn out to be very useful. Like I said in the first post, I am open to C & C as it unfolds. Quite a few of us have answered the same event related questions on a fairly regular basis and my thinking was it would be useful to have all of the answers in one place.

[Rupp]

Thanks Greg, I don't remember a wiki, so that must have been when I was on my HA hiatus.

Cheers
Al

Possibly. It was within the last 2-3 years but has been shut down for about a year now.

[sparkman]

We had a Wiki and it wasn't used much and shortly after its introduction it was spammed to the point of closure.

Thanks Greg, I don't remember a wiki, so that must have been when I was on my HA hiatus.

Cheers
Al

[Rupp]

Thanks for doing this Randy. Much appreciated! I wish HST would provide a Wiki to allow this type of documentation though.

Cheers
Al

We had a Wiki and it wasn't used much and shortly after its introduction it was spammed to the point of closure.

[sparkman]

Thanks for doing this Randy. Much appreciated! I wish HST would provide a Wiki to allow this type of documentation though.

Cheers
Al

[rmasonjr]

Excellent! You are among the most helpful around here.

Sent from my SCH-R970X using Tapatalk

[Rotech]

I am very happy that Randy is going to be professor for this forum, he seams to have great knowledge of events and conditions for HS3. Yeaa!!!

[donstephens]

Good idea.