[ANSWERED]: Turnning a toggle into a deterministic switch

I am slowly but surely getting a handle on my mixed Insteon/Z-Wave control. I just installed the Insteon 74551 garage door control and status kit. Everything works -- I can raise and lower the door and I have a variable with the current door state. All good.

But I hate toggles. I don't want to be part of the control system. I don't want to have to manually check the state of the door before activating the toggle to put the door in the state I want it. I want to be able to say, "Open the door," or, "Close the door." After all, I have a computer to monitor the state and determine what should be done. If I say, "close the door," and the door is already closed, it should just stay closed. Likewise for "open the door."

It seems to me that, ideally, I should be able to check state before executing an action. It would make it so simple to do. And I can do that in a trigger but, apparently, not an action.

So I am at a bit of a loss. This seems to me like such a basic function that I suspect what I want to do is already built into Indigo and I have just missed it. Can someone please point me to it? And if there is a way to check status in an action group, or to simulate a trigger from the UI in order to use a trigger more like an action group, then that would help too.

Thanks in advance.

[matt (support)]

Take a look at Perry's Cynical Behaviors plugin.

A classic garage door control device that takes a door sensor and a dry contact wired to your garage door button and turns them into a standard Indigo relay device smart enough to get the 99% case right. Lets you say "close the garage door" and have it do the right thing. And it's smart enough to recognize when it's confused.

Bingo! Thank you. I figured I was not the first person to run into this. Hmm, this seems like a candidate for an intrinsic feature.

[jay (support)]

In Indigo, switches are deterministic. I/O Lincs aren't switches - it's a generic I/O device which contains an input and an output. The two are independent of each other and function completely separately. You can use them together to create a single logical entity (a garage door or gate for instance), but that's just a logical implementation on top of a generic I/O device.

We have on our todo list adding a device type like a garage/gate that would get it's own controls.