Routines
Where an instinct is a protective behaviour Sensa builds and maintains for you, a routine is yours: something you put together from the things your van can already do, so it happens without you thinking about it.
You will find the Routines tab on the Intelligence dashboard, next to Scenes and Instincts.
The tab
Every routine you have built is a tile, showing its name, what starts it, and how many extra conditions it checks. The switch on a tile turns that routine on or off without opening it, so you can stand one down for a trip and bring it back later. Tap anywhere else on the tile to open it.
Add a routine sits at the end of the tiles. It opens the same editor, empty.
Building one
A routine is three answers, and the editor asks them in order.
When
What starts it. You pick it by working inwards, rather than from one long list:
- Date & time, a time of day.
- Devices, something in your van changing: a door opening, a switch going on, a battery dropping below a figure you set. This opens on the same categories you see elsewhere, Lighting, Electrical, Water and so on, then the devices in the one you choose.
- Presence, who is in the van.
- Sun & weather, so you can start something at sunset rather than at a clock time that is wrong half the year.
- Alarms, when the van raises one.
A group with nothing in it is not shown at all, so a van with nobody added has no Presence to choose.
Once you have picked something, say what has to happen to it: equal to a state, or above or below a figure.
On a van with more than a handful of things to choose from, a search box sits at the top. It searches everything at once, across every group and every category, so you can type part of a device's name and pick it straight from the results without knowing which category it is in.
And If
Extra conditions, all of which have to be true at the moment the routine is triggered. It offers the same groups as When, without Date & time. Leave it empty and the trigger alone runs the routine. + Add condition puts a row in, and the bin icon takes one out.
The difference matters: When is the moment something changes, And If is what has to be true at that moment. "When the door opens, and if it is dark" runs on the door, not on the dark.
Then Do
What happens. Choose one of:
- Entity, one thing in the van and the state you want it in.
- Device, everything of one kind on a device you pick, so a controller with four channels takes one line rather than four.
- Service, for anything the first two do not reach. It takes an action name and, if it needs one, a target and its details. Most routines never need it.
Saving, and getting rid of one
Give the routine a name at the top, and Create writes it. Reopening a saved routine offers Save instead. Cancel leaves everything as it was.
Delete routine sits at the foot of a saved routine. It asks you a second time before it goes, because there is no undo.
A routine tells you when it ran
Every routine writes a line to the Log when it fires, and the line names the routine as a link. Tap it and you land back on that routine, ready to adjust it.
Using a button as a trigger
A scene button is a Zigbee button that sends presses and nothing else. It switches nothing and reads nothing, so it gets no card of its own: the point of owning one is to bind a press to something, which is what a routine does.
Pair it, then build a routine with When, Device, and pick the button. The presses it sends are offered by name, reading Button 1 · single press, Button 2 · double press and so on, so you can give each button and each kind of press a different job.