Lighting Functions

Lighting is probably the most extensively used home automation feature. Even in a very small apartment, we need to turn several lights on and off, every single day. Turning the lights on and off all around the house, can be quite a time consuming chore. Considering the large number of light fixtures in a modern home, leaving unnecessary lights turned on, can cost us significant amount of money, every year.

Conditional Control

If we would like to have the lights turn on or off, when something else happens in the house, we can use conditional control.

Conditional control can use any event in the home which sends an event signal to the home automation system. Here are a few examples:

- a door opens or closes
- the home theatre projector turns on or off
- a television set turns on
- the telephone rings
- a car is on the driveway
- the elevator arrives to the main floor
- the alarm system goes off

Based on the events above, we can have any kind of lighting or other functions to occur.

- if the pantry door opens, the pantry lights turn on
- if the home theatre projector is on, the theatre curtains open
- if the TV is on, the front access lights dim down to 20%
- if the telephone rings, a light flashes in the home theatre
- if a car is on the driveway the front lights turn on
- it the elevator arrives to the first floor, hallway lights turn on
- if the alarm goes off, the emergency lights turn on

The use of Conditional Control can be combined with the Event Scheduler, as well. If we would like to prevent the driveway lights to automatically turn on after sunrise, we can setup an "driveway lights auto on, disable" function.