ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Inputs and outputs > On/off inputs > Setting up an on/off input > Specifying what actually triggers an input switch

Specifying what actually triggers an input switch

In brief

You should use the buttons on the On/off input's settings page to specify what will trigger the input, i.e. what will make the input active.

Details

In general, you will want an input to be triggered (i.e. made active) when its physical input is ON. However, the input might normally be ON and you would like the input to be triggered when it goes OFF.

Obviously, there's a question here of when a physical input is ON and when it's OFF, and this definition depends on the how the physical I/O device has been configured.

As well as simply requiring a physical input to be ON or OFF, you can also require that it remains in this state for a certain period before the switch will be considered active. This can be useful if you don't want to count very short activations of an input as true activations, or if you want to apply a longer debounce interval to an input (by default, ANY-maze debounces all inputs using a 20ms debounce interval).

The duration value that you enter can use any of the following units: h (hours), min (minutes), s (seconds) or ms (milliseconds). You can mix units and also specify decimal values. So, for example, the period of one and a half minutes could be entered as '1.5min' or as '1min 30s'. If you don't specify any units, then seconds will be assumed. You can enter any value from 1ms to 1 hour, or you can enter 0, which is useful if you don't want the switch to be debounced at all.

If you are using multiple physical inputs, then the settings you make will apply to all the inputs individually. For example, if you specify that the input is triggered by the input line switching OFF and you have chosen to AND 4 physical inputs, then the switch will only be considered active when all 4 inputs lines are all OFF.

ANY-maze help topic T0138