HG is great but

[dutchie]

I say goodbye.
It is to hard to get "things done" without any programming experience.
I can't even manage it with http://www.homegenie.it/docs/automation_overview.php.

Thanks everyone for all the help and special thanks to Gene for sharing his hard work on his projects.

[bkenobi]

HG is really best suited for computer programmers/engineers/those with similar mindset.  If that is not how your brain works, it could be difficult to use this program.  Fortunately, there are a number of other HA software tools out there that work more graphically and do seem to help people who want to work with HA in that way.  I used ActiveHome Pro for several years and found it capable of doing most tasks and was 100% graphical, so no programming.  But, it is very limited in capability if you want to do something it wasn't designed to handle.  AHP did have an SDK available, so if you did want to learn to code, you could use pretty much anything you know and is windows compatible.

That being said, I found the learning curve daunting with HG initially.  Once I understood how to access different things, it became much easier.  The thing is, you don't directly access modules the way you might expect.  You have to locate them via a query first, then you can do anything you want.

If you decide to give it another go down the road, hopefully things will come together for you.

[dutchie]

Well like I said: HG is great.
Hg has a lot of abilities (if you know how to program).
Never tried AHP, because I don't have X10, it's only zwave here.
I even tried commercial boxes but none was able to make things happen the way I want.
Most of the programms I've tried are based on the (graphical) blocks with only the simple if then else structure.
For my needs I need more complicated solutions, of which I think is possible with HG though.
No I don't have a programmers mind(setting) but I do have a "shifted mind"  .
(If I write a macro in Excel (takes some days), I send it to a co-worker and after a day he returns it refurbished. So it chokes up less memory and/or less nesting of function calls.)

For instance I don't like weatherforecasts like WU, the nearest station is 25 km away from my home, so the predictions are most of the times wrong. Is it raining at the station or at my house? My solution: create a rainmeter, take a infraredsensor and a piece of glass. The diffusion of the IR will change due the rain on the glass. But that's all I can come up with so making my own rainmeter will never finish.

Other example: Use of the sunset to switch on a light is nice but when it is full day and there is severe weather it gets quite dark in the house, but the light won't turn on because it ain't no sunset. Simple solution: take a sensor with lux-meter, switch on the light to a certain level according to the percentage of lux. Even looking at the programmcodes already in HG it fails me to write the proper code.

Other example: I want my dimmer to smoothly increase (or decrease) to a certain level (so not something like set level to 10% pause(10) set level to 20%). I created a simple formula, used MS-Word to "convert" it to some kind of C#-code. You can guess never worked. Googling around I came up to Robert Penner's codes (much better then mine). and to make it more complex I need to know if time now is between x and y hour and am I home or away, sleeping or awake.

So my next step is going to the library to see if I can find one or more books to get a programmers mind  .

[bkenobi]

FWIW, the types of things you are asking about are common goals for HA.  Lights turning on early when a storm or dark cloud passes is commonly requested from what I've seen.  The only way to handle this is with a light sensor.  With X10, many motion sensors include a light sensor (though they are not adjustable unfortunately).  I considered leveraging this, but if the cloud passes quickly, lights get toggled and it would seem strange.  Perhaps something where if it's within xx minutes of dusk and cloudy...

Anyway, HA is something anyone can do but it's much easier for those that can code.  I wish I knew more languages so some of this stuff was easier for me too!