[misterhouse-users] How to avoid bogging down cycles on state changes?

[Kirk B. <ki...@ka...>]

Right now, when I'm about to leave home I press the "away" button on my
control pad by the garage door.  This puts the house into 'away' mode,
which causes the garage door to be opened, the thermostat to be changed,
the fans to be turned off, and the lights to be turned off.  

My problem was that on the state that the away mode changes, one cycle
took like 20 seconds to complete (doing all of this).  Unfortunately,
the garage door did not open until the end of all of that. 

My solution was to first set a timer for turning off the lights (since
that is a lot of X10 traffic) to do it in 2 minutes or so.  But even
that was not enough (still a 7-second pause).

So, I changed it so that the garage door was opened and *then* the away
mode was activated.  This fixed my specific case, but to me there is a
more general problem I don't know how to solve.

Is there a way to do some events right away (i.e. the events I am
physically watching for or waiting on) and other events "pretty soon"
(i.e. at the earliest convenience, maybe after a few idle loops)?  Right
now I accomplish this by creating a lot of timers, but it is possible
the house could be busy doing other stuff when the timer is run,
Creating all of these timers is also a bit of a coding nightmare.

Is there a better way?

-- 
Kirk Bauer <ki...@ka...>
http://linux.kaybee.org | www.autorpm.org | www.logwatch.org