Hi.
I know - the title’s not ideal, but I couldn’t figure out something better.
Problem: In my battery low report flow, I send warnings when it’s time to replace a battery. My robot vacuum is also caught here, and when it’s run for a while it starts sending out warnings. I guess it sends them every 1% decrease in battery, starting at 20%. That can get pretty annoying after a while!
I don’t want to exclude the vacuum as some times the dogs nudge it out of position in the charging dock while playing, I stumble over it or something else causes it to juuuust come out of position, lose its’ charge and then not be usable when I need to remove dog hairs. So it needs to be part of the flow - only not as often.
Anyone know a way to keep it from being so damn annoying, while still getting warnings? I might be able to divide by 5 and checking if the rest is a whole number? That would at least only warn me every 5% decrease. I might also be able to check if it’s more than 5 minutes since the last time it sent a warning? Or…I could separate it to its’ own flow and disable it for 5 minutes?
Thanks, I’ll need to check how often it reports before I can do that. It would be a shame if it reported on 16, 14, 11, 6 and then died without warning
You can check this in Insights.
It is also possible to define ranges, e.g. between 22 and 18%.
Or you can also deactivate a flow for a defined time and then reactivate it.
Or you can trigger a flow for example only every 15 minutes, check the battery capacity and send a message if the battery capacity is below 20%.
Or, or, or….
Thanks, @Peter_Kawa and @DirkG . I did something I think might be better than the suggestions here - I created a variable for the battery percentage for my vacuum, and it will only trigger warnings if the battery level is less than the variable. It will update the battery variable for each pass.
But…Two questions you might be able to answer:
I’m using a logic card to compare battery to the variable - but isn’t it possible to do something like “if #battery less than (variable-5)”?
I found the “Any device’s battery alarm turned on” card, but it doesn’t seem to trigger. Anything any of you are familiar with?
YW!
I just remembered you don’t have to create flows to receive warnings about batteries with less than 20% juice.
I also get timeline warnings about my robovac battery, which are totally useless to me.
No clue how to disable that.
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It is
Format: {{[variable] - 5}}
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I try to stay away from those kind of cards, they use quite some resources.
And like I wrote earlier, Homey warns you by itself about batteries running empty.
@Peter_Kawa hmmm…I was actually unable to write anything in the variable box. It doesn’t accept curly brackets, and if I try to write something like 5+ and then click the label sign…the text disappears.
Yes, the same with my robot-lawnmower that floods the timeline with ‘warnings’ about its battery every day. I wish it were possible to exclude certain devices’ energy warnings from the timeline.
@DirkG Do you know if there’s a setting for the warnings? I’ll try to disable my flow and see if it still warns about low battery or not, but as for now I don’t see any indication of it doing it.
I didn’t make it “complicated” (in your eyes maybe, we all look different at things right?), I just wanted to prevent the hassle sometimes to get the cursor in front of the selected variable. Here it sometimes takes 15 s. before something is happening, or it just won´t enter the cursor in front of it. I’m on Android by the way, maybe the ios version works smoother in this particular case!
So , this is why I explained it as I did, Dirk!
