Here is a simple technique which will turn lights on and off in a way that
should 'deter' all but the most clever crooks.
Following this is a technique for telling you whether any motion has been
detected in the house for the past few minutes !
The idea is to have a global script which you can start for any reason, like
if you don't arrive home as planned, or if you're gone on vacation.
In the simplest example, you must choose the 'units' that you want to
turn on and off while the script is active.
Select which lights you want to include
Here's what this group "Night Lights" might look like if you used the standard XTension Demo database:
Note that it isn't a very good idea to include 'outside' lights in this group as you
should have motion sensors that turn these on and off...
Now, we need a script which will randomly 'toggle' the members of this group.
This script is really simple, but amazingly does create a random sequence of lights
going on and off which looks a lot like there must be humans in that home...
Starting and Stopping this thing:
You must now determine just when you want to have this script 'kick off'. It will stop itself automatically before midnite, but if you get home before midnight, you will want
to be able to stop the lights.
Starting it is a simple thing. You can have a line in your 'sunset' script that says
something like :
execute script "Random Walk" in 1 * hour
( Or any time after sunset that you choose. )
You may also want to have a command to send whenever you do finally get home and want the random lights to stop !
So you create a new unit called "House is Occupied", and be able to turn it on or off
from one of the wireless controls. In this case, the ON script for this unit would
include the line:
remove unit events "Random Walk"
OH ! When you get home, wouldn't you also like to know whether there has been any
motion in the house in the past few minutes ????
Select which lights you want to include
