I’m pretty new to this Flow thing but I managed to setup an advanced flow that allows me to use a Hue switch to enable/disable an alarm that will start the coffee machine, and a light that indicates that the machine is running on auto and isn’t malfunctioning (along with some timers that will indicate whether the brew is done or not). Enabling the alarm turns the power off and the light on, and vice versa. So far so good.
Now I’d like to be able to do two things.
When the automation is enabled I want my speakers to tell me the current alarm time. I can make them talk but I can’t access the time.
I want to adjust the alarm time ±15mins, with speaker feedback, using the dim up/down switches on the Hue.
In both cases I’m unable to figure out how to access, or manipulate, the alarm time. Using the alarm infrastructure would be preferred as it integrates well into other things. I can live with having the time as a separate text variable and replace the alarm with a Timey trigger, if I can figure out how to manipulate the time by 15 min steps. I’ve read about Better Logic and Timey but I can’t see how to put the pieces together.
Any and all advice is appreciated. I feel like I’m missing something obvious here since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else having this problem.
This way you can insert the time in any field presenting a ‘tag’ symbol:
– Click into the text field of a card
– Click on the tag symbol on the right, and search for ‘date’ or ‘time’
– Select the [time] tag
Thanks for the input. This was what I was trying to get around. I can get the current time, and date, no problem, but I want it to tell me, through the speakers, what time the alarm will fire, and be able to adjust the time, using the Hue remote, without going through the alarm interface in the app.
I have a background in software engineering so going all in on scripting is feasible but I’d like to avoid it if I can, for the sake of maintenance and availability for the rest of the family. Or maybe I just need to pull the plaster and go down that rabbit hole. This is all new to me and I haven’t figured out where the limits are on the different alternatives. Or if it’s even possible to solve.
Thanks! That provides me with a starting point for some trial and error. BLL is a bit of a mystery.
I don’t think that it should be this difficult to do simple date calculations. I’m considering creating a ‘Better Alarms’, or a ‘DateTime’-app that could be used for string to date, datetime manipulation, and more convenient access to the native alarms infrastructure. Or I’ll just start with a Homey script now that I’ve confirmed that there doesn’t seem to be any easy, existing way of doing this. Taking a string variable as input, adding time to it, and returning a string should be quite straight forward using javascript’s native libraries.
I’ll look deeper into your suggestions as well as some other options when I have some more time on my hands.
