Node–RED is a fantastic and powerful yet easy to use programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways. For more information on Node-Red go to the Node-Red site.
BigTimer is the the most 
powerful and best-ever, most comprehensive timing node for Node-Red, providing a general purpose timer as well as handling summer/winter correctly as well as (importantly) lighting-up time (for which you should provide your longitude and latitude from Google maps or similar).
After all you probably don’t turn the outside lights on at 6pm!! You most likely want them on when it gets DARK.
At it’s simplest, BigTimer can be used as the equivalent of a simple mechanical timer, deeding other Node-Red nodes or directly manipulating devices by, for example, MQTT protocol.
BigTimers can be used singly or in groups. Full support is provided for dusk/sunset dawn/sunrise and variations also for day/week/month (and special days) control.
BigTimer has three outputs, the first of which updates when there is a change of state and presents one of two messages (for, for example, MQTT or other control mechanism)
The node offers outputs suitable for MQTT, speech and databases (but you don’t HAVE to use any of these). You can also manually over-ride the UTC time setting on the host computer if required.
The second of three outputs offers a simple 1 or 0 every minute in the output “payload” and also presents additional information reflecting the status message in msg.state, message.time and others – see the entire msg object output in debug for more.
The third output presents a message which could be used for speech or debugging.
There is also real-time status information displayed below each BigTimer node.
As always, the latest node-red-contrib-bigtimer is available at node-red-flows and at npmjs.com – put “scargill” in the search and you’ll see all my nodes and flows.
