Hmmm...got confused and might have missed some fundamental terminology...
I had not thought about the head line for the group of "blue building blocks" I use to listen to sensors defined in HA and call services to switch things integrated in HA on/off.
Is it these ones you reffer to as HA-Nodes?
I thought everything within the Node-Red was Node-Red and commonly used by a huge knowledge base in this forum. I have read several threads before I started asking, where these nodes are used and users asks about them. I'm completely new to NR (since about 10 days ago) and don't know what else is it used for...
But when I run into trouble and are not able to search and read for a solution, isn't this forum better than HA forum? I thought HA forums was for HA Automations and NR forum should work for NR in HA...or is there some sub-forum here I can post those questions in?
Would it be better and ok if I flag them Home Assistant?
As @Colin has said, there aren't many Home Assistant users here in this forum, and therefore we have little idea what or how the HA nodes work or do, therefore yes, if your question is about the nodes in your screenshot, you may be better asking in the HA forum, instead of here.
I only replied to you above because the context of this topic should be regarding Big Timer, which is a node-RED contrib node, but you appear to be running off-topic....
Yes, those are provided by Home Assistant as part of their install. They are not part of the normal node-red installation. Their function is specific to HA, and as soon as you start talking about Trigger:state or Event:state or Call Service nodes, for example, we can't help much as we don't know anything about them.
You don't need to use HA at all, everything that it does can be done in node-red, with the help of some user contributed nodes.
now we really comes OT...
I have been using a Telldus Tellstick Znet lite v2 for controlling lights and take actions on some sensors etc for several years. That controller is quite limited and now out of production, so not much developed and their cloud service has not been perfectly stable last years...So I decided to start with something else. I use old 433MHz for some stuff and will keep my temp/hum sensors on 433 and I use some Z-Wave for lights etc.
I bough a 2nd hand Intel NUC i3 6:th gen and set up home assistant and use a RFXtrx for 433 and have bought a Aeotec Z-Stick for migrating zwave. Plan to buy a stick fƶr zigbee (ikea lamps etc) in the future and maybe to try some shelly devices as they look to be quite much bang/buck.
After reading about automation/control I came across NR add-on and started trying it out and it looked more "visual" than HA automations, so I decided to go this rout...
Yes... I realize I came quite OT... but I got enthusiastic when I got in contact with people with much more knowledge on all this and I started to get help and learn more and progress my project!
Looks to be a NR integration sub forum at Home Assistant community
I'll try to use that for HA related question.
Was not aware and not that easy to hover the whole internet and know everything from start. Sorry.
I have got the help I needed at this time and I assume that regarding the original question it's not possible to set BigTimer to only output on time events. I have to do it in another way.
Big thanks to everyone who replied even to HA node related and OT questions!
Home Assistant is pretty good for keeping track of the state of all the devices, where node-red is event driven, keeping track of a state is more of a manual process (but not always needed).
Then again, build it once, enjoy forever.
I only use node-red and also use 433 + zwave and zigbee, there is an excellent zwave node available for node-red, same for the 433Mhz with rtl_433. In the end there are only a handful of protocols being used in home automation, node-red can talk their languages, just like HA can.
If I can point out 1 difference; HA can be rigid to a certain extend, which can be great for consistency, but can be a pain if you need to walk of the beaten path.
Yes of course it is!
We are just puzzled that you have an entire operating system (apparently) dedicated to managing IOT stuff but still have to extend it with Node-red, when we do all sorts of things just in Node-red
And what on earth is a Call Service - something to do with nobile phones?
I started with HA when I decided to move away from Telldus Tellstick and to install integrations was pretty simple and quite a lot was prepared even though some stuff had to be configured as well. I swapped to MariaDb as Db and plan to install InfluxDb for long term storage of some sensors and it as quite easy to to create some more user and per-user-dashboards etc. There were an app as well that was pretty simple to get started with.
Automation was not that visual, but I found some tips for NR and started and that is the way I came across NR.
Coming that route, it was not obvious NR could be used stand alone and that HA-nodes was regarded as HA-nodes not really belonging to NR (but still they must be NR nodes in one way or another(?))
Regardless, I thought it was just nodes that used info from HA devices/entities and passed things back to them and as they were on top of the menu that looked logical. The rest of the nodes was underneath, so I thought they were for internal NR flow handling and that everything was still NR.
Regarding "Call Service" node - I didn't name it...don't blame me
I'll try to post future questions regarding the "blue nodes" in HA community in first place, but might come back with questions here as well and hope some ones here use HA as well and knows more than me regarding those nodes.
Even though my thread came very OT, I got the help I needed and maybe I could have started another rout or could restart, but I think I give this rout a go and see where it ends up.
The screen captures I have seen of flows in HA certainly look like Node-red. I don't know but it looks like HA include Node-red but with their own nodes, standard nodes available as an extension.
I guess that the repeated "We can't help much because you have Home Assistant" looks obstructive. In fact, when I try and import someone's HA flow I just get a bunch of "Unknown Nodes" so I can see something is there but I can't tell what it's supposed to do.
Yes of course they are node-red nodes, acting as an interface between node red and HA. The problem is that if one does not know what they do, and is confronted with a flow that is dominated by HA nodes, then it is difficult to help. If the question is "I have this data coming out of an HA node, and I want to do 'this' with it", then that is ok, but if the question is "I have these HA nodes and I need to do 'this', then we probably don't know what the answer is.
