Contact vs Switch items?

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@UglyKidJoe

To turn on a light at sunset, the Astro Binding sends a sunset_start update of ‘ON’ trigger to the bus, and then immediately switches it to off again.

Just to be clear to future readers, this is the behavior of the 1.9 version Astro Binding. The 2.0 version binding uses Event Trigger Channels to trigger rules.

@UglyKidJoe

A switch item here would not make sense because if it’s dark it’s dark, there should be no option to change it manually.

To clean it up you could use a mapping (open=‘dark’, closed=‘light’) or something like that.

Now I’m not sure if that is the best way to determine whether it is dark or light, but I hope helps

Conceptually I agree. However, there is unfortunately nothing preventing you from postUpdating to change a Contact or from just checking and simply refraining from sendCommand to the Switch.

As for the best way, I recommend this which can be expanded to any number of time periods over a day and can be expanded to handle changes based on day type (e.g. weekends use different time periods from work days).