I’m having an issue with my wife’s schedule for her holiday lighting. I had it set up with the old scheduler and it worked fine. I decided to switch over to using the “new” version (yeah, it’s a couple years old now) and I can’t get lights to work. I’m hoping someone can help me set it up correctly.
What I need is to turn ON between Thanksgiving or Black Friday and January 1 at sunset. I need it turn OFF between the same dates and at 10:30pm. Here’s what I have which doesn’t seem to work:
ON:
(@BlackFriday > @NewYearsDay);@SolarAltitude.Evening.Sunset.Start
OFF:
(@BlackFriday > @NewYearsDay);(30 22 * * *)
BlackFirday:
59 59 23 ? 11 THU#4 *
NewYearsDay:
0 0 0 1 1 ? *
I’d like to get this fixed ASAP so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
HG uses NCrontab library under the hood to parse and evaluate cron expressions (and adds some new operators like ;, > and the ability to use other events through @). But your expressions BlackFriday and NewYearsDay are not valid cron expressions: expression should contain 5 or 6 groups delimited with space (you have 7), there is no ability to schedule to 4th Thursday in month directly (#4, you can only limit day-of-month) and ? sign is not specified in cron expression.
I believe you should use 0 0 1 1 * for NewYearsDay and something like 59 23 21-27 11 THU for BlackFriday.
Also, you should use @SolarTimes.Sunset instead of @SolarAltitude.Evening.Sunset.Start.
I found the thread on the old forum (archived here) where I had asked this exact question. I suspect that your input would fix black friday but in that hread someone pointed out other issues. I reverted to their solution (not elegant, but functional). I also found in the process of susing this out that the new scheduler shows a graphic for each event that will occur on the current day. Pretty cool, but doesn’t help program things on other days.