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Macros
A macro is a way of making something happen
automatically without any human involvement. In Home
DominationTM, you easily create
simple macros that do something at a certain time or when a
certain sensor is triggered. But you can also easily create
very complex macros that use very complex triggering criteria, and
perform a large amount of very diverse actions, one after the
other or even with large delays between each. You can even
have numerous macros all active at one time and everything works
without a single hiccup.
A macro is something that does a series of
"actions" when it is "triggered".
Initially the macro is in a "monitoring" state.
When a macro is triggered, it is in an "active"
state. Any macro can be triggered by one or more triggers,
either when all of the triggers are active, or any of them are
triggered, or a combination. When all actions have been
completed, then it will go back to a "monitored" state
again where it will watch to see if it needs to be triggered
again.
The following sections show the type of triggers
and actions that can be used with Home
DominationTM.
Time Trigger
- A time trigger lets you trigger a macro at a specific time,
during the day or night (calculated or determined by a sensor),
and it can recur hourly, daily, on certain days of the week,
weekly, monthly (on a specific day, week, or on the last day of
the month), or yearly.
Sensor Trigger
- This will monitor sensors from any of the supported
interfaces (CM11A, CM19A, CM15A, U401, U421, U421-SC3 or U451). You can trigger on any function (on/off/all on, etc) and you can also trigger
if the value of the sensor is >, >=, =, <=, < than a certain value, for instance, start a macro that sends an email if the temperature falls below 40 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Activity Trigger
- Trigger based on the activity or lack of activity for a group of sensors. For instance, if there is no motion from any of your indoor sensors for 30 minutes, turn all the lights in the house off
(inactivity trigger), or if the indoor activity resumes after there has been inactivity,
then start a welcome home macro (activity trigger).
Group Trigger
- This lets you group any other type of trigger together and treat
it as a single trigger. This is helpful if you need a mix of
triggers where some need to trigger if any of the triggers are
active, and some need to trigger only if all of them are active.
General
Control Switches
- When you want to turn on a switch (lamp, appliance, or whatever), this is the
action for you. This action can be used to turn on the switch and
optionally turn it off again after nobody for a certain amount of time after
there have been no triggers tripped. It can repeat an on and off sequence
too, so you can flash a light if you like.
Delay Before Next
Action - You may want to pause between actions in a list. Add this
action between the items that you want to pause between.
Sound
Beep - This action makes
your computer beep using one of the standard beep sounds.
Play Sound - You can
play a wave (.wav) file using this action. You can have a lot of fun with
this one.
Email
Send Email - A macro
can send an email by using this action.
Remote Network Client
Alert Network
Client User - This action lets you pop up a message box on a network
client that is connected to your computer. You can display the message on
any remote network client, or just the network client of a particular user.
Video
Video Snapshots
- Use this action when you want to take a snapshot from a particular video
source. It can take multiple shots if you like, or it can do a movie clip.
Advanced
Run - This allows you
to run another program or pop up a web page or do
anything else that you can do when you click the Start button and then click
Run.
Start /
Terminate Macro - This allows you to trigger another macro or stop
another macro if it is currently running. When starting another macro, it
will run concurrently with this one if there are more actions after this macro.
FTP (Copy to/from a website)
- This
action is used to copy video snapshots or other files to or from a website or anything else that supports
FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
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