@SunBeech Yes! You can assign an icon and a color to most features of FlowBits from app settings ![]()
That’s great!
I installed your app and am going though the documentation on flowbits.nl.
How do I set the step size for a slider? I don’t see an option to set this in the widget config or via the available flowcards.
@SunBeech Oops, my bad. I was working on that and forgot about it entirely while working on another feature
Step size is not implemented in the slider yet, but it’s easy to implement. Will do it soon ![]()
FlowBits 1.15.0
- New flow action: Activate flag for [duration].
- New flow action: Activate mode for [duration].
- New flow action: Set timer [name] between [duration1] and [duration2].
- New flow action: Start timer [name] between [duration1] and [duration].
- New flow condition: Flag [name] is active for at least [duration].
- New flow condition: Flag [name] is inactive for at least [duration].
- New flow condition: Mode [name] is active for at least [duration].
- New flow condition: Mode [name] is inactive for at least [duration].
- New slider widget setting: Step size.
The new conditions will work from activations and deactivations made in this version, as in previous versions the app did not track last updates.
Thanks for the quick add!
If I try to configure the step size (in the widget’s settings) I am not able to change the default value (1) as the virtual keyboard on my iPad is not shown when tapping the step size field. I restarted the Homey app, but that specific field does not activate the keyboard.
@SunBeech Weird. I’ll test it on my iPad when I’m home!
@SunBeech Maybe a problem with the app itself I guess? It’s working here…
EDIT: Updated the Homey app itself and now it isn’t working here as well. It’s an app issue. Cannot even change the title of a widget.
Strange… In my case the keyboard pops up on all fields, except the step field. E.g. I can edit the title:
EDIT: I also checked some other widgets from other apps that have numeric fields. There I get a special numeric keypad when tapping the field:
@SunBeech After I restarted the Homey app it worked, everywhere…
Ah… how silly. Indeed that worked!
Version 1.15.0 is now live, see my previous post to see what’s new.
Just gotta come and say thanks for the sets feature, it’s great for detecting presence in areas.
I have one feature requests for the timers, if possible ofcourse; Is it possible to somehow check the time remaining on a Timer and put that in a local Tag?
@Jesse_van_Vliet Glad you like it!
For the feature request, would that be a new flow card? Something like “Retrieve the remaining time of timer [name]” and return the remaining time in two new tags “Remaining time” (HH:mm:ss) and “Remaining seconds”?
Now that I think of it, maybe a generalized flow card that also can give the status of the timer back, you’ll get status, remaining time and remaining seconds. So the new flow card could also be “Retrieve status of timer [name]”.
Some of the recent smaller features were added by GitHub Copilot, I imagine that this would be a great task for Copilot as well ![]()
Yeah that sounds great. I reckon copilot is pretty good with creating these smaller logical nodes.
@Jesse_van_Vliet I just released v1.15.2 to test, which has the new “Retrieve info of timer [name]” flow card. Waiting for approval for the production release ![]()
Copilot did a pretty good job: Add timer info flow action with status and remaining time tokens by Copilot · Pull Request #32 · basmilius/homey-flowbits · GitHub
@BasMilius great app which replaces quite some other apps and things I had to do in my flows. I was wondering if it would be possible to do something like a “repeating/infinite” timer? So a timer that basically fires every X Seconds/Hours/Minutes until it’s stopped.
My use case for such a thing is for example doing something as long as a button is pressed. So if I press down a button (long press) I want to run a timer that fires every second, and when this timer fires I dim the light by +/-10%. When the button is released I stop this timer.
What do you think about this? I can also create a PR for this if you want, but just want to know if this is something you are interested in and if this should extend the current timers or be a “new” thing?
EDIT: Also something else I noticed, is there the possibility to delete unused timers/modes/etc? In the edit options I only can change the color/icons but not way to remove them.
EDIT2: Ok just found out you actually clean up unused modes, etc. just had some test flow that was still referencing it. So if anything it would be nice to have a overview which flows uses which mode etc. But I can also do that via HomeyScript now that I know this.
@staeff Thanks for liking the app!
Regarding repeating timers, I actually was thinking about this a few days ago and am thinking the architecture through. I could go with adding new flow cards to the timers feature, such as “Start repeating timer [name] for [duration]”. The “Stop timer [name]” flow card could then also function as a stop for the repeating part. Another way would be to add an entire new feature intervals, but that seems to overkill because it’s basically timers. I’m curious what you think though!
And about seeing which flows use particular features, someone asked about this over at GitHub and my response was that it’s not that straightforward for FlowBits. It’s easily made, but it requires me adding the `homey:manager:api` permission and if I do that now, the app won’t auto update for the current install base.
I talked about creating a new hidden app or a tool over at flowbits.nl for managing and viewing more. The question in particular was renaming modes, that is currently not possible.
While I think that a separate entity might maybe be slightly easier to understand, I like the simplicity of reusing the same entity and some of the possibilities that it gives you like “Make Timer [timer] repeating” and “Make Timer [timer] non-repeating” (so basically just finish the current iteration and then stop).
I think you just need to clarify how existing cards relate to these timers. E.g. does “Timer [timer] finished” fire for each iteration or only for the last iteration? Does a random timer use a different time for each iteration or the same?
As you said not adding this permission is probably the right choice if it’s only for this functionality. And probably can be solved by just linking people to some Homey Script or other instructions in the docs.
@staeff I went with extending the Timers feature. The two new repeating cards describe in their hint that the Timer finishes card is triggered for each iteration.
FlowBits 1.17.0 [TEST]
- Repeating timers.
- New “Start repeating timer [name] with [duration]” flow action.
- New “Start repeating timer [name] between [duration1] and [duration2]” flow action.
Repeating timers can be stopped by the “Stop timer [name]” action or are overwritten by the “Start timer [name]” action.
The existing “Timer [name] finishes” trigger is triggered for each iteration.
When starting a repeating timer with a random duration, the random duration is calculated again when the timer restarts, so it’s totally random.




