REAL-TIME EVENTS | CONDITIONAL LOGIC | VARIABLES | SCRIPTING | IO MODULES
Timing is everything. Pharos systems respond to a wide range of stimuli, from real-time events to serial messages. Pharos Trigger is a rules engine that uses a powerful conditional logic principle, to create exactly the behaviour you want, when you want it.
Pharos Trigger is built on a powerful three-part conditional logic principle which lets you define exactly how your installation behaves:
The trigger defines when something happens.
A trigger can range from a simple button press to complex events like sunrise on every Thursday of even months. Types of trigger include real-time events (date, time, sunrise, sunset), user input (touch panel, webpage, buttons), protocol triggers (RS232, RS485, Ethernet, MIDI, DALI), dynamic triggers (DMX input, analogue, audio input), and many more.
The condition provides the circumstances for something to happen.
A condition is a question that must return a positive answer for the actions to be carried out. For example, “is it Sunday?”, “is input 1 high?”, “is timeline 2 currently running?”. Multiple conditions can be added to each trigger, enabling complex logic to be built, or if not required they can be skipped altogether.
The action describes what happens.
An action can control something internally within the Pharos system, such as starting a timeline or controlling external interfaces. Actions include starting/stopping scenes or timelines, providing user feedback (e.g. on a touch panel), sending a protocol action (e.g. output any serial or Ethernet command), and more. Multiple actions can be added to a single trigger to have several things happen at the same time.
Pharos Trigger is the key to creating art out of time. Create mood and feature lighting for homes and gardens, control the colour of a bridge by the times of the tides, set the colour of a building by the phase of the moon, manage a shopping mall’s lighting by the time of day and seasonal events.
The real-time clock has flexibility for programming recurring events such as religious and secular holidays, bus timetables and tide charts. It has worldwide support for daylight saving, sunrise, twilight, sunset, and civil, nautical and lunar calendars.
The basic Pharos Trigger conditional logic rules are powerful enough to build behaviours for the majority of installations. But for those wanting even more, there are three extra tools at your disposal:
Pharos Trigger can capture and analyse data in a trigger in the form of variables. These variables can then be used as parameters in an action. This powerful concept can be used to quickly build complex behaviour, for example, to decode a message received over the serial port, and have a number contained in the message indicate which timeline to start.
Pharos Trigger supports scripting in the Lua language. Scripting provides a way to have custom code run on the controller, to perfectly tailor the controller’s behaviour to the application. We provide a well-documented API to let scripts interact with all aspects of the controller to provide advanced control logic for your project with unlimited flexibility.
IO Modules expand Pharos Trigger by adding extra triggers, conditions, and actions – no scripting knowledge required. Not only can these be used for integrating with a range of 3rd party protocols, but they can also be used to quickly add common blocks of logic, such as counters, timers, random selections and repeats. Read more on IO Modules here.
