Hello all, I have what really is a feature request for Athom I guess, as there has been quite a few requests similar and the normal response to those has been “use Chronograph”, start a timer, run a different flow when timer ends, etc., etc.
However, I do not want to do that, and for ease of flow logic and simplicity it is not a valid or good solution for me.
What I simply need is for the advanced flow “Delay” option to have a variable tag selection, rather than only a fixed numeric amount. To me this seems very obvious and sensible; however, I’m likely not understanding why this might be difficult to accomplish in the underlying code.
Nevertheless, my request is that Delay would have:
current option where your type your specific delay amount number, and select sec or min.
tag selection to select a given numeric variable name, and also then select sec or min.
Does anyone else agree that this would make things a lot cleaner and easier, at least in some circumstances? It really seems like something that should have been created from day 1 of “Delay”, but…maybe that’s just me.
Maybe so but many situations call for a delay before retrying something, perhaps repeatedly or a set number of times - which is what my situation calls for.
I don’t care that it can’t be interrupted as this is something that is happening from 2am in the morning onwards, fyi.
@GrayV8
A crash/powerdown/restart doesn’t only interupt the countdown, it even resets it. Flows you’d expect to continue, don’t continue.
For me a reason to never use those delays longer than a few seconds. It even shouldn’t provide for minutes as unit.
Another downside of wait cards: when still counting down and triggered again, it can be started in parallels without any visual indicator. It’s a black box.
I’d rather use Chronograph timers, because they can either get restarted or resumed after new triggers while counting up (Chronograph counts towards a timestamp, which makes it survive restarts ánd still apply the duration correctly).
And, as you know alr, it takes numeric variables or even tags as value.
Thanks @Peter_Kawa and others for the helpful feedback; I certainly understand that using Chronograph or similar is a much better ‘bullet proof’ way to ensure flows or logic processes correctly in the event of outages or whatever.
However, the reality of a lot of basic users like myself is that we simply don’t need to over-engineer flows and logic to manage once in a blue moon situations. I’ve literally had one power outage in the last year at my house. Probably my HPro has rebooted or gone off line a few other times as well, but it’s really not a big deal.
Also, the flow / logic in question is not related to security or door access etc to my house; it’s just turning on some sprinklers at night, and doing that or not based on wind speed. If it fails outright, I really don’t care. It’s not controlling Grandma’s night light so she doesn’t fall down and break her hip, or whatever other more risky logic situations some people might have with their home automation
I really still can’t understand why it wouldn’t be something offered by default. I would be interested to hear from anyone else who might like to see it (back me up, please!), otherwise I’ll resign myself to having to use multiple flows and a separate app like chronograph.
