Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 7 - Schedules
2 The Home Control Assistant
About schedules and schedule entries
Creating schedules and schedule entries is a very powerful aspect of HCA. In order for you to take
full advantage of the possibilities, you need to understand a few important terms.
Term Definition
Schedule A schedule tells when things will happen: when devices
will turn on and off, when programs will start, and run,
what the “plan” for HCA is. A schedule is composed of
a list of schedule entries.
HCA can contain more than one schedule.
Schedule
Entry
Each schedule entry contains the date and time that one
device or group is turned on or off. A schedule entry
can also be used to start a program.
Current
Schedule
The current schedule is the one schedule in your design
that HCA uses to control devices at the times specified
by its entries. Only one schedule can be current at any
time, but you can change which schedule is current.
Out of all the schedules present in your design, you can mark one of them as the schedule HCA
makes current when your design is loaded. Of course, your design can be loaded, or HCA started
on your computer, in one of two situations: either normally (you started HCA or loaded a design),
or restarted after a power failure (when HCA automatically restarts as you have set it to). You can
also choose to have a schedule marked to become the current schedule when HCA restarts after a
power failure. Normally when HCA starts the last schedule that was current when HCA shutdown
is made the current schedule, but there are options to modify this.
Hint: The name of the current schedule is always shown in the status bar at the bottom of the
HCA window.
When you begin creating schedule entries, you will see that there are six kinds:
 Entries that send an On command at a certain time to a specific device or group
 Entries that send an Off command at a certain time to a specific device or group
 Entries that send an On command at a certain time, and later send an Off command to the
same device or group
 Entries that start a program with an On or Off command at a certain time
 Entries that initiate a scene stored in a device
 Entries that change the setpoint and other properties of a thermostat
 Entries that send sequences of IR commands
In addition to these six kinds, if the schedule entry sends an On command and the device supports
dimming, then you can also specify the illumination level of the device. If the device supports
stored scenes, you can specify the scene name.
You can see that in HCA you can not only schedule devices but also groups and programs. If a
group is scheduled to go on (or off) at a given time, each of its members goes on (or off) at that
time. Before you start creating schedules and entries, it is important to think about what actions
you want to happen in your home and when they should happen.