Introduction

The programmable Scheduling capability of the Alec ZC001 is one of its most powerful features. It allows the ZC001 to behave differently at different times of the day, different day-of-the-week or any special date in a year.

For example, a lighting zone may be scheduled to be turned OFF after 9:30pm where no body is expected to be around. But the motion sensor is active so that if it detects any motion the light will be turned ON to the full working light level, thereby lighting up the path way for workers who happened to stay late. The vacancy detection is set to 120 seconds, so that two minutes after the worker has left the zone the lights will be turned off automatically. If there is an unauthorized intruder who enters the premises the lights will also turn on automatically, and this can trigger the security camera to better record the actions of the intruder. The normal lights now effectively has become security and safety light.

The same lighting zone is also scheduled to be turned ON to 20% power level at 7:30am just before the first worker arrive. The motion sensor is active and will turn on the lights fully when it sensed the human presence. The vacancy OFF timer is now set to 600 seconds, so if nobody is detected for 10 minutes the lights will dim back to the 20% power level.  This ensure that area that are not always occupied would not waste unncessary electricity to keep the lights fully on.

During the day the timer-OFF switch function is also enabled for 3600 second (1 hour). Thus you will be able to keep the the lights ON  for one hour by manually switching on the light (instead of letting the motion sensor turn on the light) and it will bypass the vacancy OFF timer for the duration of the timer-OFF switch. When the timer-OFF count down has expired (after 1 hour), the vacancy OFF timer will takes over and will dim down the light to 20% when the space is unoccupied.

On weekend, the lighting zone should behave like the after hour of weekday. i.e. keeping the lights OFF until motion is sensed and time out after 2 minutes.

The above-described functionality are very easily achieved using the Programmable Scheduler described below.

Day Schedule

A schedule is a collection of time slots that define how each of the ZC001 control function would behave from certain time of the day. 

In the above example, at midnight (0:00) the light level is schedule to be OFF (0% brightness) and the timer-OFF function is disabled. The No Motion OFF Timer (vacancy timer) is also disabled and sensing of motion will do nothing. This essentially turn the ZC001 into a pure manual switch where you need to press the push button to turn ON and OFF the light (although you may still adjust the brightness manually using the push button)

At 7:30 in the morning, the ZC001 will turn the lights ON and set the power level to 10% only. Time-OFF function is still disabled but vacancy off timer is set to 600 seconds (10 minutes). This means that if ZC001 does not detect any motion for 10 mintues the lights will dim down to the scheduled level of 10%. Motion->ON function is enabled which means that when ZC001 senses people it will brighten up the lights to the last brightness set by the user (the last brightness set by user either via manual push button switch or from the Config & Control slider).

At 18:00 (6pm) the lights is still scheduled at 10% level when inactive. The No Motion OFF Timer (vacancy timer) is now set to 120 seconds only which means that when no body is around for two minutes the lights will be dimmed down to 10%. The Motion->ON  is still set to YES which allows ZC001 to brighten the lights when it senses motion.

To define the time slot, click on the table cell on the "Time" column and a Time Picker Dialog will open up to let you select the time for the schedule.

The time format by default is 24 hours format. But it can be entered in AM/PM format if you select the check box. If you have configured the ZC001 to use the Sunrise and Sunset time during the "Configure & Control Device",  then you can also select the time as Sunrise or Sunset time instead of a fix time. The actual Sunrise and Sunset will be calendar dependent and ZC001 will compute the daily actual Sunrise and Sunset time and use them for scheduling purpose.

You can define up to 16 time slots for any day schedule. And you may also define up to 20 different schedules (with each schedule having its own 16 time slots of data) and these are numbered as S-1 to S-20 as described below

Use your mouse to right-click on any cell in a selected row  (high-lighted row) and a pop up menu will appear to allow you to efficiently define your day scheduling, as shown below:

You can insert a blank row in between two rows or delete a selected row. You can also easily copy a row and paste it onto another row in the same schedule or another day schedule.

In order for the program schedule to work properly on the ZC001, all the time zones defined in a day schedule must be unique and must be sorted in ascending order. Before you transfer the program schedules to the ZC001 Alec Commander will check your settings and refuse to transfer if the settings are invalid or not in sorted order.

You can automate the sorting process by selecting the "Ascending Sort" menu item from the popup menu and the entire table in the current schedule will be sorted according to the time in ascending order. (from 00:00 to 23:59).

20 Different Day Schedules

The 20 day schedules can be selected by clicking any of the 20 radio buttons as shown below:

Each day schedule is also assigned a unique background color to make it easier to identify the different day schedule that you are working on as well as identifying which  day schedule has been assigned to a particular day.  The following shows two different Schedules S4 and S8.

You can also assign a meaningful name (up to 40 characters max.) to each Day Schedule and these will be stored into the ZC001 non-volatile memory when you retrieve them, which makes for easy reference.

Lighting Plan - Assigning Day Schedule to Any Day

Once you have designed your Schedules you can start to assign the schedules to the day of interest. Starting with the Day-Of-The-Week (Monday, Tuesday.....Sunday) and assign the day schedule to each day. These day schedules will normally be used for those days only if they do not match any one of the 23 special dates that you can also define.

Below is an example of schedule assignment. The days of the week (Mon, Tue...Sun) are represented by the first seven boxes on the lighting plan screen. To assign a schedule number, first click on the box and it will bring out the currently selected schedule (default is S1 for all). Click on the same box again and a drop down menu will appear to allow you to select the schedule number from S1 to S20.

In the above example, Monday is assigned Schedule S1, Tuesday S2, Wednesday S1 again and so forth. 

You can also define up to 23 "Special Dates" in the year after the first 7 boxes. To define a date, click on the "--/--" symbol if a date has not been defined for the box, or click on a defined date and a Date Picker Dialog will open up as follow:

The Date Picker Dialog allows you to either:

1) Define a particular day in a year by the Month and the Day as well as the number of days that the same schedule will be applied starting from that date. In the above example Dec 25th is defined and will cover both Dec 25th and 26th.

2) Define a special format such as "The 2nd Sunday of March"   or the "1st Tuesday of November" by clicking on the "Special" radio button.

The defined date appear above the box where you can again click on and select the schedule S1 to S20 from the drop down menu.

A Day Schedule assigned to a special date has higher priority over the regular day-of-the-week assignment. In the above example, the date Jan 1 is defined and has been assigned the schedule S4.

Assuming that for this year, Jan 1st happens to fall on a Wednesday, ZC001 will use schedule S4 instead of schedule S1 since the special date has higher priority over the assignment to the regular Wednesday.

Saving your Schedules & Lighting Plans

You can save all your schedule definitions and lighting plans to the hard disk any time by clicking on the "Save To File" button and enter a file name to save to. The saved program schedules can be read back from the hard disk anytime.

Transferring Schedules & Lighting Plans to ZC001

Once you have saved the program schedules to the hard disk you can now transfer the program schedules to the ZC001 by clicking on the "Write To Device" button. A Write Device Dialog will appear as follow:

In a network of ZC001 controllers, multiple devices may be assigned the identical schedules and the "Write To Device" dialog allows you to transfer the same program schedules to multiple devices by selecting their IDs before clicking on the "Write Settings" button.  In the above example if we select ID 02, 04 and 06 and then click on the "Write Settings" button, the same Schedules and Lighting Plans will be written to all three devices and the result will be logged onto a Log windows so that you can verify if the plan have been properly written to each device ID.

Retrieving The Schedules & Lighting Plans from ZC001

You can also retrieve the settings that have been transferred to any device connected to the same gateway by clicking on the "Read From Device" button and then select the ID of the device whose plan you want to retrieve to examine:

Designing Master Day Schedules

Since every ZC001 is a completely self-contained automation system,  with its own dedicated storage space to store all the programs and data it needs,  each ZC001 absolutely could have its own unique day schedules definition and lighting plans that is different from all the other ZC001.

However, for management ease, we strongly recommend that you design a set of master day schedules that are applicable to all the lighting zones througout the premises instead of defining ad loc sets of day schedules for each devices. This is because if every device on the premises uses the same master day schedules you can quickly understand what each Schedule # means when you go over the lighting plan of a device without having to examine every schedule # in details.

You should probably start off with a week-day schedule and a week-end schedule for the general office area. You can also define the  weekday and weekend plan for meeting rooms, corridors area, storage space, wash rooms and perhaps also a weekday plan for two-shifts operations.

These different lighting locations are likely to have different needs and therefore special day schedules catering to their special circumtances can be defined. Since there are a total of 20 day schedules available for use it is generally sufficient for common office lighting needs.

Using ZC001 Scheduling for Indoor Argricultural Lighting

Besides controlling office lightings, the ZC001 could be ideal for green house lighting control. 

The best plants growth may require several hours of lighting with different intensity, followed by several hours of rest time with either low intensity or complete darkness. Since each Day schedule can contain up to 16 different time slots you can easily use the ZC001 to schedule the time of the day with different lighting intensity to fall on the plant.