Sometimes, you want to go to bed while listening to the TV, a rhapsody playlist, a local radio station or something along those lines. More often than not, you fall asleep before you remember to turn everything off. What to do? Create a sleep timer. We’ll build on the previous post of creating custom buttons for this one. Click the more link to find out how.

First, open Composer Home  Edition go to the Agents tab to make sure the Timer agent is installed. If it’s not, you can click the “Add” button and choose “Timer” from the list. Click “OK” and now your Timer agent is ready to go.

After you’ve clicked the Timer agent as illustrated above, right below this area will be the box displaying any timers you have installed. If you have none, it will be empty like so:

Click the “New” button, and you’ll be presented with a dialog box asking you to name your timer. For this example, we’ll call it “Sleep Timer 30 Minutes”, which will give us enough time to watch an episode of “Hogan’s Heroes” reruns before falling asleep.

Now that our timer is created, let’s define how long it runs. Select the timer in the left hand window, and then adjust the run time in the main window section. You’ll see buttons for starting, stopping, and resetting the timers here – don’t worry about them for now, we won’t be using them. Note that for now, the maximum number you can enter is 60 seconds, 60 minutes, or 60 hours… if you need to do an hour and 15 minutes or two hours 45 minutes, we’ll have to work around that using the first timer’s expiration to trigger a second timer….

Now that our timer is ready to go, let’s create that custom button that will trigger it – if you need a refresher, click here. Alternatively, you can trigger this by a colored button on your remote (as seen here) or with a 3 or six button keypad. While you’re at it, you can create a button to turn off the timer, in case they are showing back-to-back episodes (a new episode of “Hogan’s Heroes” is unlikely at this point, unfortunately.)

Once we’ve setup the custom button (named sleep timer in our case), it’s time to insert the programming that  will make the timer start when the custom button is pressed. Go to the programming tab, and then find the custom button on the left by scrolling all the way down under “Device Events” and clicking (no need to expand) “Custom Buttons”. Then, below that window, choose the screen that the custom button appears on in the drop-down menu under “Custom Button Events”. We like to execute our programming on the “Release” of the button instead of the “Press”, so select the radio button for “Release”, and then move to the menu on the far right. Scroll all the way down under “Device Actions” until you find “Timer” (again, no need to expand). Below that is a window for “Timer Actions”. Choose the timer you’re working on, and the action you want to happen. In our case, that’s “Sleep Timer 30″ and “Start Timer”. After it’s selected, a green arrow will appear above that window with the code. Drag the green arrow into the main screen in the middle called “Script”, and it will look like this:

Do the same for any additional sleep timers you may have created.

Now that the sleep timer has a way to be activated, we need to tell Control4 what to do when the timer expires. So, go back to the “Device Events” pane, scroll down until you find “Timer”, and choose the timer you’re working with. Choose the action for when the timer expires. In our case, we want to turn off the room we’re in (which is the only room the custom button is active from – however you can add a variable to track which room you’re in when the button is pressed so Control4 will only turn off that room, but allow the button to be accessed from anywhere). Find the room and click the name of the room. You’ll notice that the action selected by default and ready to go is to turn the room off. Go ahead and drag the arrow with the code line to the middle window.

If you’d like, you can create an announcement as well to pop-up a notification letting you know that the timer has been activated or stopped. Other than that, this is complete! If you have any questions or comments, post them below.

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