I’m a big fan of gaming on my iPhone and often get so immersed that I forget to adjust my smart home settings (like dimming lights or muting notifications). Recently, I discovered the Scarlet iOS app store, which offers a great selection of tools and apps to enhance the gaming experience and even manage smart home integrations. It got me thinking about how I could take my setup to the next level.
Has anyone found a clever way to integrate Homey flows with gaming sessions? For example, automating game mode lighting or even setting up flows to minimize distractions during playtime. I’d love to hear how others are managing their smart homes while gaming!
I’m still looking for tips on managing Homey Flows during gaming sessions on iPhone, especially for automating things like game-mode lighting or reducing distractions.
To give more context, I recently explored the Scarlet iOS app store, which offers some cool tools for gaming and smart home setups, but I’m curious about how others might be leveraging Homey’s capabilities for similar purposes.
For example, do you use specific triggers like app launches or notifications to activate flows? Or maybe there’s a way to sync Homey with gaming accessories or platforms to create a seamless experience?
I am using appletv for gaming. (Zwift). There , a hue sync box on the hdmi between atv and monitor is controlling hue led strips based on video output.
My iphone also start homey flows via automation/shortcuts
But you said that there are ipa’s for home integrations in scarlet . Which ones?
On my iPhone I use the shortcuts app to automate things. In homey I create flows that start with the “When this flow is triggered” card and then set state in homey. These flows I call “actions”. These actions are made available to be called from outside the Homey app via widgets or through shortcut automation. I have created actions to mark myself away or at home, or asleep or awake. I also created actions to set moods. I have then setup some shortcut automations to mark myself at home when I arrive at home, or away when I leave home. I also made an automation to mark myself asleep when sleep mode is enabled, and mark myself awake when sleep mode is disabled. This way I loosely coupled Homey to the state of my iPhone without needing to give the Homey app access to location services or other device info.
You can do the same thing for when certain apps are opened. I created a quick example.
In the Homey App create this Gaming Mood and the action to enable the gaming mood:
You can of course create more actions and also extend these shortcuts for when the apps are closed, etc. But I woud keep these actions very simple and restricted to only set a certain state or variable within Homey. I would then create advanced flows that trigger when this state is changed for more advanced automations. This way you keep a bit of separation between what programmers call the interface (The part that communicates to the outside) and the implementation (The part that does the advanced logic).
You could for instance also create an action that sets a variable ‘isGaming’ to ‘true’. You can then create an advanced flow that could do loads more automation when you are gaming, like setting the Gaming Mood, and disable other distractions.
