Rooms, Floors and External Lights

[John Winter]

Hello All,

Just wanted to poll opinions on the best way to deal with the following scenarios

External lighting

I have, at the moment, 2 external lights controlled by Cortex - the light objects exist in seperate rooms outside the ground floor, but within the main house object. In fact, one of the rooms in the ground floor has a door opening into one of the 2 'outside' rooms. This setup seems to work ok so far, but I was just wondering if this was the preferred option for this situation.

Upstairs and downstairs hallways

How should one configure Cortex to handle a situation where a PIR is installed both in the upstairs and downstairs hallways - is it just as simple as configuring an always open door between the the the two rooms on different floors?

Cheers

John

[Gumby]

It depends on what you want to happen. You can link the upstairs and downstairs with a "stairs" object. If the lighting circuits are common then you want the PIRs both feeding to the same room presence, but if there are separate lighting circuits then each room has presence independently.

[John Winter]

I'll probably go then with the stairs object (didn't actually realise there was one!)...

Does my approach to external lighting make sense to you?

[Gumby]

I'm not sure about the external lighting - what means of detecting presence do you have i.e. do you have a PIR that will pick up motion on the garden side of the exit doors ? Do both outside "rooms" have this detection or are they more like "regions" of your garden ?

[John Winter]

Yes - your assumption is correct, I didn't put enough detail in my question. I have external PIR's connected via a DIO, which infer presence in the garden 'rooms' (they also activate my external camera recording). I have ticked the 'routes into room incomplete' checkbox to ensure that presence times out correctly. They seem to work OK but I'm sure there's more than one way to achieve the same end result.

[Gumby]

Sounds OK to me - but one consequence is that any logic connected to "house occupied" will include garden presence (including potential false alarms from animals etc).

I'm not sure how rigidly the hierarchy is enforced or whether you could put a house inside a house object to allow some separation - so top level house would represent property including garden and lower level the "real" house.