I am trying to setup a rule that will trigger on a schedule (or if I click the run rule button) that will turn off 14 switches and then back on after 30 seconds, I have every camera on a smartplug (switch). That is the easy part. I would also like for each switch to do this 2 minutes apart. This is the piece that I am struggling with. What is the most efficient way to do this? I know that it would take 28 minutes to run but is this possible?
I would probably do something like this:
I don't know if it's the most efficient way, but it's the first thing I thought of. I tested it here with a couple of light switches and it seems to do what you want, you'd just have to add another 12 off/delay/on/delay actions.
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Thank you Russ. I am still learning Rule Machine. This looks like what I was looking for. I start building that rule now.
You're going to yank the power for every device once per day... Believe me, this cannot be good - for any device - in the long run.
Any camera with a half decent firmware will have the ability to schedule a reboot once per day. This is the far superior route to take.
Yes, I am aware that this doesn't account for a potential camera lockup, in which case a firmware schedule reboot wont work. Having said this, and as an aside, if you are plagued by this behaviour with your cameras, you need better cameras!
No, I am going to yank the power once a week and it is the occasional camera lockup that I deal with. Sometimes it doesn't happen for weeks but it does occasionally happen. I wouldn't say that I was plagued with the issue though. New cameras are planned but I have other priorities right now.
I would still investigate the daily reboot schedule in firmware. If your cameras are locking up once in a while because of "resource exhaustion", the scheduled daily reboot should eliminate this (I think); similar to how folks are rebooting the HE hubs daily to deal with reduced speed issues.
This is going to be a very, VERY long rule. What I would recommend is that you write one rule for each camera, then have another rule that triggers each of the individual rules 2 minutes apart. That will make it a lot more manageable if you add/remove cameras. So, in one rule you will turn off the one switch and then turn it back on after 30 seconds. You'll have 14 copies of that rule and then in an overarching rule you'll have each rule fired 2 minutes apart.
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That's a good idea. I did however already finish the long rule and am about half way through running it to make sure it works. So far so good. I may redo it later though.
These sound like Iris cameras that you have factory reset. I have 4 of these that are exhibiting the same behavior, but a lot more frequently. I ended up creating a rule to reboot them every hour.
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They are. Could you share your rule?
Wow. That's a lot of restarting. I maybe had 3 or 4 in a month lockup out of 14 on average.
They probably don't need to be rebooted that often, but the the lockup was random so it was difficult to determine how often they really needed it. I just decided to do it once an hour and they've been running this way for 6 months now without any issues.
Well these are Sercomm cameras that were originally used by the Iris platform to record events and record upon alarm. They are fairly limited, There is no user interface but we did manage to figure out how to use the cameras built in API. It is a bit clunky but makes the cameras usable without Iris. You can reboot via the API but there is no way to schedule a reboot. If the camera is locked up you can't reach it anyway, so scheduling a reboot is not really an option. There is no doubt that there are a lot better camera options out there but I have a lot of them and they were essentially free because when Iris shut down they paid me full retail for the cameras. So right now they are what I have and if yanking the power a couple of times a week breaks them, there is no big loss. Looking at @Vettester's record of hourly power yanks, it appears that the risk is low.
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