Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 7 - Schedules
The Home Control Assistant 3
Considering schedules and entries
Before creating schedules, it’s best to think a bit about how to organize them. In HCA schedules
can be organized in what is called a
parent and child relationship. What this is all about is best
shown by an example. Suppose in your home you have both outside and inside lights that you
want to control. Every day you would like to have the outside lights come on at dusk. Also, when
you are away from home you would like the inside lights to turn on and off to make the house
looked lived in.
You could create two schedules: one for when you are home that controls only the outside lights,
and another for when you are not at home and controls outside and inside lights.
If you do this the schedule entries for the outside lights need to be added to both the
at home and
away schedules. Rather than duplicate your work, HCA can organize your schedules like this:
Using the terminology introduced above, Home is the parent and Away and At Home are children.
In HCA it is possible to have children of children and as many parent schedules as needed. But be
careful as it is very easy to get confused!
Organized this way, there are three schedules.
Home, which contains the controls for those things
that you want done regardless of if you are home or not.
At Home contains those things to be done
when you are home (just the one entry in this case), and
Away for making the home looked lived
in.
As described above, the
current schedule can be any one of these three schedules. When a child
schedule is the current schedule, all the entries in it
and in any of its parents are used by HCA to
control your home. In the above example, if
At Home is the current schedule, both the schedule
entries for the fish tank and the outside lights happen. If
Away is the current schedule, all the
schedule entries for the inside lights and outside lights happen.
It’s also important to consider what type of schedule entries you might need before you start
creating them. You will want different types of entries for different purposes. Here are some
examples:
1. You like to wake up in the morning to music, so you want the radio to come on at your wake
up time. Just before you leave home in the morning for work (varies somewhat each day)
you’ll turn it off manually.
2. You often forget to turn lights off when you leave home in the morning or when you go to bed
at night.
3. You want to turn your outside lights on at dusk and off at 11:30 p.m.