How do others open and close their blinds by schedule?

[CDriver]

I have automated my blinds and it worked well enough for a year or so in various versions.

Given that I now have to change the rules due to Joda datetime, I thought it might be a good opportunity to rethink how I do it.

Basic requirement:
A rule to trigger a certain amount of minutes after or before a sunset but have an absolute boundary.
For example:
Open 30 minutes before sunrise but not before 7am (Sunrise in UK is 04:45)
Close 30 minutes after sunset but at latest by 8pm (Sunset in UK is 21:30)

Existing way was to, every minute, check the minutes of day against the minutes since midnight for opening and closing times and if triggered, send command.

It’s a manual rule with lots of code and items. Anyone got an easier method?

[Marfi (Martin)]

I am using the Time Of Day Pattern. I used in with OH2 and with OH and Java based framework which is now even easier and more powerful to use:

[Deprecated] Design Pattern: Time Of Day

[Edit] Adde link to Time of Day State Machine For years now I’ve let this Design Pattern post get out of hand so I’m going to rein it in a bit now. It’s really expanded away from what it’s originally intended to be (i.e. a way to illustrate how to code a time based state machine) into a thread that is mostly about the example, Time of Day. It’s partially my fault for naming the thread “Time of Day”. But there are better alternatives for Time of Day in specific and time based state machines in g…

[sihui]

@CDriver

Anyone got an easier method?

The astro binding does exactly that:

Astro - Bindings

[CDriver]

@sihui

The astro binding does exactly that:

So two things I cannot work out with that alone:

1. I have multiple groups of blinds. Kids, lounge, kitchen etc. I want them to open at differing times.
2. Not critical but I would like it to be “user settable” so the offset to sunset can be changed via HABPanel. I don’t think you can do that as the offset is in the channel.

I use the astro binding as the base for sunset and sunrise but cannot use it alone. Options?

[sihui]

@CDriver

I want them to open at differing times.

Create more than one astro thing and configure different times for each one.