Ability to see when external devices such as AC or fans are turned on & off by an external controller using external I/O pins?

Wishlist
#1

I wonder if it’s possible to use those Input / Output pins on the Pulse to connect an external box that has 120v or low voltage DC inputs to chart when an AC or a fan is activated by an Inkbird or other controller? At the Inkbird controller, just plug in an outlet splitter in the outlet that controls the AC, one side to AC, other side to external box that goes to Pulse. I realize a 120v input may not be the best, perhaps we could plug in a 5v or 12v DC wall wart that gets energized when the AC is turned on by the Inkbird. Then the external box could simply use a low DC voltage to indicate when the AC is activated.
I really just want to see when the AC turns on & off on the graph. One reason is if I set the temperature too low & the RH isn’t high enough, the portable AC will just keep running, trying to get cooler but just can’t get there unless I increase the RH slightly & it’d be so nice to be able to monitor this. Also it’s not entirely obvious when the AC is on or off just by looking at the temperature, especially when these portable ACs have that goofy 5 minute compressor delay built into the AC in case it was tipped to give the refrigerant time to settle in the bottom, I’d love to take the AC apart & bypass that delay. If this feature were possible to add on to Pulse, it’d be ideal to add an adjustable delay where it enables an offset (just like the leaf temperature offset for VDP) for that 5 minute delay so I could subtract that 5 minutes off, so when it appears on the graph that the AC is running, it’s actually running & not sitting in that 5 minutes delay waiting to turn on.

I realize this is asking a lot & I’d probably be better off doing this on my own, but I guarantee a lot of people use portable ACs in their tents & would love to see that information on the graph; I know I’d absolutely love to have it & can’t be the only one. I believe people running exhaust fans to cool their tent / grow room may like to see that info as well, because if a fan is running non-stop when it initially was only cycling , they could alter something with their setup to get it cycling properly again. It could also be used to see when your humidifiers / dehumidifiers are running & maybe even pumps for the DWC guys, but I think those are usually on timers.

#2

Something like this on any monitor or controller would be nice. I only know of one consumer level controller that records equipment cycles but even they do it wrong because on their daily graph they only show data points every 5 minutes to an hour depending on the zoom, so something that only ran for 4 minutes or up to 59 minutes would show as never having activated, or alternatively it might show that it was active when it wasn’t because two points were referenced when it was on.

In order to support this, manufacturers would have to abandon the idea of values only at time intervals, and instead use more complete and descriptive or adaptive graphs & databases.

It would be great if someone would eventually give us this feature because of how much better we could tune our equipment. For instance, is my humidity going up because my dehu turned off or because my AC turned off? Is my heat going up because a dehu turned on or because my AC turned off? Is my exhaust fan running almost all the time (or never) because of a failing CO2 sensor? etc etc.

#3

Exactly! It’d be far easier to ‘tune our tent’ by getting our equipment dialed in. Like you said it’s not entirely obvious why humidity / temperature made a change or we may assume it’s because of one piece of equipment when it’s really something else. Thinking about it in that context, despite Pulse already being a game changer for monitoring grow tents, that would really bump it up as the ultimate piece of gear to have to get your tent / grow room dialed in!