If been using a bigtimer in a NodeRED flow to automatically turn on the garden light at 7:15 am and turn it off again at sunrise.
This was working just fine until a couple of days ago when I noticed the garden light was on long past sunrise. Turns out sunrise is around 7:00 am at the moment so apparently the light is turned of at sunrise (7:00 am) and then on at 7:15 am. I had hoped bigtimer would be smart enough to not turn on if the on time is later than the off time.
Does anyone have a suggestion how I can prevent the light turning on if sunrise has already passed?
Would using “Dawn” instead of 7:15 work for “On Time” (“Dawn” is always before sunrise)?
Or, On Time = Sunrise with an “On Offset” of -15?
Or a check/node before Bigtimer to check if Sunrise has passed.
I chose the on time of 7:15 because that’s just before the time my wife will leaving in the morning when she needs to work early. So when it’s still dark in the winter, I want the light to be on when she walks to the shed to get her bicycle.
There will be days in the year where using dawn as the on time would work, but in the winter dawn would be too late. For the same reason, an offset would not work as an offset that is large enough in the winter would be way too large in the spring and in the summer the light doesn’t need to turn on in the morning at all as it will be light outside way before we even get out of bed.
I was thinking about a check node myself, but after the bigtimer. But I don’t really know how to go about that. It would need to check if sunrise of the current day has passed and if the message from the timer is the “on” message for the lights. I need to work out how I could perform such a check.
I was hoping I was just missing something about the bigtimer. Surely I’m not the first person who wants a light to be turned on at a specific time in the morning and off at sunrise (or dawn, same issue) but not have the light turn on if sunrise has already passed? I’m kinda surprised bigtimer doesn’t take this into account.
Is there maybe some other timer node I can use? I’m not looking forward to devising my own check. I just know there will be edge cases I’ll overlook.
