Scheduled Macros and Actions

Macros may be called as a scheduled event. There are two ways scheduled events may be created. You can do so by voice ("open schedules", "At 10:30 PM today turn off bedroom light"), or by manual entry.

Voice schedules currently may only control devices. You can, for example, tell HAL to shut off a light at 10:30 PM. But you cannot tell HAL to run a Macro at 10:30 PM.

There is only one known way to have HAL run a macro at a time that can be scheduled by voice. That is to tie the macro execution to a device. The device in question need not be real. Simply tell HAL that a fictional device exists. Then write a rule with the device status change from off to on as the trigger, and your desired macro as the action. Be sure to turn the device back off as a part of your action though, as subsequent activations will fail because HAL believes the device to be already on.

The only way to set up a schedule is via the Home Automation Setup Wizard. Clicking on the schedules button and selecting "Add" opens the proper dialogs to guide you through the process. HAL Homenet is promised to offer the ability to do so in the future.

There is one other way, albeit rather limited, to schedule an event. As a part of any action event, you can select an option to delay the action from a minimum of one second to 24 hours. Selecting a delay results in that action being scheduled as a future event.

Using this technique you can easily schedule a macro to run "later" as a scheduled event. There are good, valid reasons for doing this even if the delay is only a couple of seconds.

When HAL executes a macro from a VR or DTMF trigger, HAL goes "deaf and dumb" while the macro is executing. Exactly why this is so is a mystery known only to the HAL architects, but it probably has something to do with the relative priorities assigned to the various execution threads, or processes, within HAL. The VR process necessarily has a high priority.

Scheduled events do not seem to hang the system the same way that triggered events do. Therefore, delaying a macro with a lot of actions, even if it's only delayed a couple of seconds, results in HAL being able to respond to additional voice commands more quickly than if the same macro is executed directly from a VR event. This little trick can make HAL seem much faster and more responsive.

Macros