I created a routine that fires my Gentle Wake Up routine 5 minutes before my phone’s audible alarm goes off. I dug around the forum a bit to see how others have used the gentle wake, but it looks like they were all using the builtin features of either a fixed time schedule or some manual activity. I typically get up around the same time on weekdays, but can vary sometimes by 20-30 minutes, and I don’t want to have to remember to go into SmartThings and turn the process off if I’m not going to work in the morning. I have multiple alarms saved that I label like, “Work”, “Work Late”, etc. I always turn my alarm on before I go to bed, choosing the one that is appropriate. After setting up this, I simply edited them to go off 5 minutes earlier, and be silent.
Step 1 of course, is setting up the Gentle Wake routine in SmartThings. I called mine “Wake With Bedroom Corner Lights”. I recommend an incandescent light for this, I can’t get LEDs to start anywhere near as dim as an incandescent.
Step 2: Authorize your new thing in SharpTools (if you need help with SharpTools, the developer, @joshua_lyon, is active here and is extremely helpful)
Step 3: Build your flow in Automagic ($3.90 currently - if you want to try it out, you can get a trial version from the Automagic website here)
Set Flow Name: “Start Morning Lights With Alarm”
Trigger: Next Alarm
Condition: Time Range (only continue if within the defined range - I set this to weekdays from 5am-7am)
Condition: Expression: global_me_home (this is tied to my presence routine, if I’m not home, I don’t want my bedroom lights turning on. You can skip this or base it on SmartThings default “Home” mode if that works for you)
Action: Plugin: “A Thing”
a. Device Type: Gentle Wake Up Controller
b. Device: Wake With Bedroom Corner Lights
c. Command: on
Action: Script: (I have my phone alarm ring 5 minutes after my lights start, change the parameter here if you want a different duration)
time5=addMinutes(triggertime, 5);
h="{time5,dateformat,HH}";
m="{time5,dateformat,mm}";
Action: Set Alarm
a. Hour: {h}
b. Minute {m}
Action: Set Flow State (disable this flow for the day so it doesn’t restart when the audible alarm starts - I enable the flow in my bedtime routine, but you could just enable it based on a time trigger)
a. Flow pattern list: “Start Morning Lights With Alarm”
b. Enable or disable flows: Disable
Step 4: Set up your Android alarm - this is just an easy way to set your trigger for the Automagic flow (I use the Google Clock app - I’m sure there are others that would work, but the Samsung one defaults new alarms to giving you a Bixby report, rather than having a default alarm tone)
Set the alarm for 5 minutes BEFORE you want to wake (this is when the lights will start coming on)
Set the alarm to Silent and turn off vibrate
I’ll probably fiddle with the ramp-time a bit, maybe start it a bit earlier and spread out the dim up time, but I really like having the light start to wake me up before my alarm sounds.
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EDIT: Updated the image to a 16:9 ratio so it displays right in the post, thanks @joshua_lyon for the tip
Very cool use of SharpTools and Automagic - thanks for sharing!
It’s great to see a use-case using an alternative to Tasker. The programming-like nature of Tasker can scare some people away whereas the decision-flow design of Automagic is at least a little bit more inviting.
Edit: I’m not certain, but it seems like Discourse crops images which are taller than 16:9 (git commit | post)
I didn’t like the fact that I had to set my wake up alarms for earlier than I actually wanted to wake up, and even more, I didn’t like the fact that I had to set them as silent for v1. If the flow failed for any reason, I would get no audible alarm, which is bad™.
So here’s version 2.
So the background in case you didn’t read the 1st post: I have multiple alarms saved that I label like, “Work”, “Work Late”, etc. I always turn my alarm on before I go to bed, choosing the one that is appropriate. This process starts a Gentle Wakeup Controller a few minutes before any of my alarms go off between 5am & 7am on a weekday.
Step 1 of course, is setting up the Gentle Wake routine in SmartThings. I called mine “Wake With Bedroom Corner Lights”. I recommend an incandescent light for this, I can’t get LEDs to start anywhere near as dim as an incandescent.
Step 2: Authorize your new thing in SharpTools (if you need help with SharpTools, the developer, @joshua_lyon, is active here and is extremely helpful)
Step 3: Build your flow in Automagic ($3.90 currently - if you want to try it out, you can get a trial version from the Automagic website here)
Set Flow Name: “Start Morning Lights Before Alarm”
Trigger: Time
a. Weekdays: set as appropriate, I have M-F checked
b. Time: set as appropriate, I set it to 5am
c. Option: Allow in device idle/doze - CHECKED
d. Option: Like alarm clock - UNCHECKED (I’m not completely clear what this would do, but maybe it should be checked too…)
Condition: Expression: global_me_home (this is tied to my presence routine, if I’m not home, I don’t want my bedroom lights turning on. You can skip this or base it on SmartThings default “Home” mode if that works for you)
Action: Init Variable Next Alarm
a. Variable: next_alarm
Action: Script (check if there’s an alarm set, then set some variables for later use - I have my lights start 7 minutes before the alarm, change the 7 in the last line of code to whatever you want as your lead-in)
Step 4: Set up your Android alarm. Any alarm app should work, I’ve used the Google Clock app and Sleep for Android.
I’ll probably fiddle with the ramp-time a bit, maybe start it a bit earlier and spread out the dim up time, but I really like having the light start to wake me up before my alarm sounds.
I just recently purchased a Philips Wake-Light from Amazon for a decent chunk of money and after using it a few times find it very un-intuitive and clumsy. I also don’t like the idea of going away from a ‘smart’ device and using something that feels like I would of had it in the 90’s.
So I decided to do some digging thinking Smartthings should be able to do this for me and after looking at a few options that seemed clunky (as you mention in your own write-up) this seems idea. The fact that I can use the native alarm functionality on my android phone seals the deal for me.
I will say that it’s not 100% effective - sometimes the light fails to start. I usually snooze my alarm for 5min the 1st time it fires, so if the light isn’t on, I hit a SharpTools shortcut to start the Gentle Wake process at the 1st alarm. I haven’t taken much time to DX the issue, but the Automagic process is completing successfully, so I assume it’s a communication failure between Automagic & SharpTools, or between SharpTools & SmartThings.
If you have any logs from AutoMagic and SharpTools from the time of a failure (or the next failure), I’d love to see them. A handful of users are seeing inconsistency with Tasker and I’m trying to track down what’s similar between the devices.
I have the same device, patch level, software versions, etc as some users and I can’t seem to reproduce it, so any additional data would be helpful!
