At least as far as I have understood the native alarm system of homey doesn’t help me a lot. I use flows with a logic variable to define certain behaviours to be active when a ercatin value is set. Like child alert when kids are in bed. I start this alarm mode by starting a flow manually which sets the variable to on or off. Works so far. But Id like to be able to see if a certain mode is active which would mean seeing the variable being on or off - or even bettera variable than can control several alarm states. Didnt manage to achieve this with a virtual device so far.
In short: I want to have three to five different alarm states to control level of spaming me with push messages and I want to see which state is active and the best way would be to have all states shown in one symbol. If not possible at least in different (“binary”, on/off light symbol) symbols/“device” buttons.
Any ideas?
Homey gives you standard building blocks to make your own use cases.
You cannot blame Homey not to provide your use cases implemented out of the box.
You missed the point of my introduction and your answer doesn’t add anything to the topic. Just to be clear: I just said that I don’t use a native function because I may have missed something (I used „as far as I understood“ for a reason)
So if I understand your request correctly, you have implemented all your alarm states and notifications via flows and variables but the bit you’re stuck with is creating a single device which can switch between 3-5 different custom ‘modes’ (with current mode displayed on the device tile) and you’d want a trigger card for that device changing mode which you could use to trigger flows to set variables (although actually you might not need the variables any more since you could just use the device state instead).
I’m reasonably sure you could do it with an Advanced Virtual Device created using the Device Capabilities App for Homey | Homey app. It’s fairly advanced though and I’ll be honest it’s not something I’ve tried. But I’m definitely interested if you do get this working.
Actually, simpler still should be the Mode device using this app: Virtual Devices App for Homey | Homey (by the same author) but that way you’d need 3-5 separate Mode devices, one per mode. For a single device switching between modes I think you’d need the AVD one I linked above
I had a play with the AVD device in the Device Capabilities app and you can do pretty nearly what you’re after.
I now have a device which looks like this and for which I could easily have chosen any name and any icon I liked:
Opening that device looks like this. The status on the tile itself updates when the mode changes, with the name of the mode - so you can at a glance see what mode the device is in without having to open it.
As you can see, I have four ‘modes’ called Bright, Regular, Mood and Night. Currently this app only supports pre-determined sets of options here:
But you can go to the forum for this app and request other sets to be added. So you could get a custom set created for you by the app author.
Have you considered using Heimdall?
It gives you all that you need.
