Pause Command Seems to be Short

[kblagron]

I just set up another motion detector using the Elk that, once triggered, turns on a couple of TV's to display the security cams. 

I use the pause() command in a several of the action commands to wait while the driver switches to analog TV, etc.  I also use it to wait while the cams are displayed before going back to whatever the TV was doing before.

What I noticed was, during the long pause - ie 800,000 millisecs while the video stream is being output to the TV, that it only goes for about 190,000 millisecs.  Is there a better way to do this?  

Essentially I want the TV to display the cams for about 10 minutes, then go back to what they were doing, either off, or the programming they were on.    It seems like the millisecs entered in the command is not the real time it pauses.

[Dean Roddey]

There is a limit on the time, but it should be the same limit as what is enforced by the action editor. You don't typically want to have actions blocking for long periods of time.

A common way to do it is to use a timed field write. That's not very practical if you need to do a bunch of stuff. But if you just need to change a field in each TV's driver, then it would be fine. It also has the benefit that, if you write to the field some other way, the timed write is cancelled. If you do it via a blocked action, that guy is still there and might fight you if you chose to get back to the TV and set it to some other input. The action would wake up later and set it back to whatever it was before, whereas the timed write would have been cancelled.

And, if you mange to trigger the action more than once, you don't have multiple actions piling up. One timed write just overwrites the previous one.