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I will pay $100 for a decent set of rule examples with screen shots and explanations.

John Cunningham shared this question 9 years ago
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Hi Guys, I see a lot of people here love your product, as do i

but are frustrated by the lack of detailed examples of how to do things

like randmize lights on and off to simulate being at home for example

(whilst on holiday) after dark.


So my ask is this... does

one of your employees want to earn $100 by writing up as many examples

with screen shots and explanations as possible, plus some explanations

of the virtual capabilities like sensors and weather station etc. and

thing like HTTP etc.? You obviously have a lot of smart peeps there and I

have seen posts offering to setup some simple rules for people if they

give their login etc. so why not do it and earn some extra cash?


Cheers, John.

Replies (14)

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Haha, nice!


Me bay we can crowdfunded it :)

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There will be some resources soon at wiki.zipato.com

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Hello Sebastian, could someone login to my zipabox and setup a "random presence simulation" for me? I am happy to pay if there is a better support option?

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Sebastian, what do you mean by soon. Just place 1 example a week, and many clients will be happy. Make life easier and ask the visitors to share rules they have created.

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YES!! a wiki

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This is obviously one of the two darkest points of Zipato. Lack of documentation/examples and bugs (in web interface and some modules uncorrectly supported). We will be happy to see these two points corrected as the Zipato community loves this product even if some guys are about to leave for other boxes :(

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John, I fully agree just give examples rules. http://wiki.zipato.com/wiki/Sample_1_%28Rules_Creator%29 is still empty.

I am even considering to switch to an other base station, but i am not sure if it solves the issue.

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Take a look here.

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1 year ago: "There will be some resources soon at wiki.zipato.com"

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Welcome to Zipato. The company with the slightly postponed promises.


My guess is that they will add it to the Pro package... (still annoyed 'bout that one!)

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i have the pro package with both my zipatile and zipabox. it doesnt exist.. lol

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My good! But ther youtube page is maybe the easyest way. "ZipatoTv"

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I would gladly share my rules to the wiki if available...

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wiki is available, but I don't think we need more than this tool...

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How can we contribute to it?

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Did you figure out the randomising rule?

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I will make some tests and let you know, I could use one too...

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David,


I came up with this idea which is not tested yet but I think it would work for presence simulator at home. First I will explain sensors/actuators;

1. Zipabox_1hrflasher - is a virtual switch that I turn ON every hour and remains on for 10 seconds every time, I use a scheduler for this matter in a separate rule.

2. SimuladorPresencia - is a virtual switch which would be the ON/OFF switch or the randomizing rule.

3. LuzNatural - is a virtual sensor which turns ON or ACTIVE at sunrise and turs OFF or INACTIVE at sunset, I use a scheduler with astro function for this in a separate rule.


I have divided my lights of my rooms in "Groups" 1 to 3, 4 and 5 will be groups without any lights. I have one "master" rule and one rule per group.


"Master" rule - This is the randomizing rule which generates randomly a number between 1 and 5, if the simulator is ON, it's dark outside, and the 1hr flasher event is active. This will trigger another virtual switch "PresenceSimUpdate" which will be the "trigger" for the "group" rules.

Groups - If "PresenceSimUpdate" event is high, and the simulator is ON, and it's dark outside and the generated number matches the group number then the group lights are ON, if it doesn't match then group lights are turned OFF.


Let me know what you think, any comment or question is accepted. Best Regards.

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Hi Alberto, this is what I have done, quite similar:

1 virtual sensor 'Night' night/day driven by astro rule

1 virtual switch 'Presence Simulator' that activates presence simulator : I can turn it on manually or when alarm is armed away, with a rule.

1 virtual switch 'Activate Simulator' that triggers a rule to randomly turn some light on/off.

1 scheduler rule that runs every 15 minutes that toggle the virtual switch 'Activate Simulator' if night time and 'Presence Simulator' is on and not between 1AM and 6.45AM.

I have divided my home in 4 group of lights and my rule that is triggered by a toggle of the switch 'Change Presence Light' will do a random for each of the groups to toggle their state (as I use 433 actuators I can't check their state). And I have a wait in between so that all lights don't turn on/off at the same time.

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Hi Alberto,


That seems like a good scheme. My only comment is that, because the Zipabox is prone to restarting or losing the connection to the server from time to time, and because (even now) I'm not convinced that the switches and variables retain their state after such events (although it's true that I haven't tested it thoroughly for a while), it might be useful to have a rule that runs at intervals and tries to reestablish the "LuzNatural" sensor state in case it gets lost.


My first attempt to do this was to run a rule every ten minutes that checked the time. If the time was within the range that is *always* daytime, whatever the time of year, or always nighttime, the "daytime" switch would be set accordingly. It was pretty crude and would be not effective at, say, 20:00 in summer. Recently my "daytime" switch lost its state because of a disconnection and restart and because the time was in that range where you can't know if it's day or night without checking the season, it defaulted to "night" and my blinds and awnings started to do things at the wrong time.


Now I have a better way. I receive sunrise and sunset times from a Google Apps Script every few minutes and frequently run rules to work out how long it's been since sunrise, how long it is until sunset, etc. That way you can reestablish the daytime state with 100% accuracy and stop worrying about devices losing their state.


https://community.zipato.com/topic/need-a-way-to-store-and-compare-datestimes#comment-26273


For the presence simulator this may not matter very much. If it fails one day maybe it's not a big deal - depends on how reliably your Zipabox stays online.


When a device loses its state it's not obvious from the UI - it's the server state that's wrong. To check whether this is happening you can make a rule that checks the state and sends it to another device whose state is logged, e.g. If (daytime) set test sensor <daytime> to 1 else set test sensor <daytime> to 0. After a few days check the logs and see if anything's amiss.

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Hi David,


So far, after Zipato fixed the reboots twice, one previous to firmware 1.0.17 and now with 1.1.23, my zipabox haven't reboot, the only two times where the past couple server outages. As far as I know and tested, variables are erased everytime the zipabox reboot, virtual devices remain in their last known state such as physical devices until a new status change is received. Wow, your approach seems bulletproof, I'm solving it with a reboot check every five minutes, see attached.

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