I haven’t searched “other” providers yet, only native Amazon, and there is an inherent problem with this approach…
If you are streaming ANY Amazon native streams to any other device, trying to also play a beep/ding/sound byte from Amazon will not work because you run into that dreaded “already playing on another device” issue. Annoying to say the least.
If your trash goes only Tuesdays and Fridays, then you can ignore all the Monday holidays: Columbus, Presidents, Veterans (observed), Labor, Memorial, MLK, etc as well as Thanksgiving. You only have to concern yourself with Xmas, NewYears, and July4.
Should allow you to significantly simplify the piston.
Yeah, I see that. Interesting enough, I just listened to Alexa tell me that the mailbox just opened and it did have a ding before the announcement. This is from a Routine in the Alexa App…
Playing around with a piston to warn my son when it’s almost bedtime. I’m glad I threw in the SETVOLUMESPEAKANDRESTORE command, because I saw in the Alexa history that he told Alexa to turn down the volume, lol.
On the last two warnings, his Philips Hue lights flash as well. I could probably simply this with a lot of variables, but I wanted to make sure it worked first (I also sent the commands to my computer speaker and lights so I could see the same effect)
I have tried to change the command to the setVolumeandSpeakRestore and that did not help. I try simple pistons with a basic speak and that does not help. I can’t figure out what is preventing them from talking.
I have created several pistons like this to offer “Welcome home greetings”. I set the time present at 5 minutes to allow time for things like checking the mail. The pistons all work flawlessly except for when we are bringing in groceries. Every time the door is closed and then opened inside the 5 minute time window, the piston repeats itself. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to have the piston only run once per arrival. Any ideas?
You could use a variable for this. When you are away then the variable is set to zero, and 1 when you are back. Add a restriction to only execute it if variable is zero and set to 1 after your tasks execute.
You can also set variables such as this with a another Piston, but the variable should be a global and not local to the Piston.
If you don’t mind, can you give me direction on how to set the presence senors as a global variable. I have used some local variables in the past, but no global yet.