Light Levels.

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  • neilhooper
    Automated Home Guru
    • Oct 2008
    • 124

    Light Levels.

    Some advice please.

    We have an Outside Sensor module that gives light level as one of its outputs. Our first fully automated room is our Lounge and nearly everything is working as we want. I’d say we are 99.9% there.

    The next room that I have started on is the Kitchen / Diner.

    The Lounge is South facing and is almost always nice and light during daylight hours.

    The Kitchen / Diner on the other hand is North facing and can seem quite dark and dingy when the Lounge is nice & bright.

    The problem that I’m facing is that the lights in the Kitchen / Diner need to come on at a different light level than the Lounge.

    Is this possible without the use of an internal light sensor and if I do have to use one, is it controllable enough for the lights turning on not to affect it and make it bright thus turning the lights off and setting up a cycling situation?

    - Neil
  • Gumby
    Moderator
    • May 2004
    • 437

    #2
    If you want to use the same outside light level sensor but have a different set of thresholds for different rooms you can do this by adding a second light level object. In it's connections you set Alternate Light Level source to the output from the "real" sensor object. Under properties make sure Network Enabled is UNticked. This way it is a "virtual" object that gives you the software processing without needing a physical device. You can create as many of these as you need, but I have found two is enough to get reasonable behaviour for north and south facing rooms.

    If you did have an internal light level sensor in the room then Cortex does have features "Very bright threshold" to prevent the cycling you are concerned about. However, it is possible to manually set the thresholds to "silly" levels that will cause cycling. Properly configured it is not an issue. All my rooms have internal light sensors, as well as the external, and cycling is not an issue.
    ----------------------
    www.gumbrell.com

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    • neilhooper
      Automated Home Guru
      • Oct 2008
      • 124

      #3
      Ah ha !!

      Learning all the time, thanks for that.

      - Neil

      Comment

      • Karam
        Automated Home Legend
        • Mar 2005
        • 863

        #4
        Just also to point out (since maybe not immediately obvious), that all analogue signal type objects also have a user defined thresholds page accessible via the graph symbol at the bottom of the behaviour menu. Here you can set up any number of different threshold triggers. However it is important to understand that the front page thresholds have a special significance in that it is these that define the meaning of dark/bright/very bright (in the case of light level) when it comes to using the integrated Cortex automation functions. And it is almost always better to use the integrated automation to achieve the desired behaviour rather than simplistic logic - which can result in conflicts and become complex to write when several factors have to be taken into account and across an entire system.

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