How to Turn on a Device for 15 Minutes of Each Hour

[Umpiloto (Nick Looper)]

Hello -

I have a SmartThings v2 Hub with many connected devices.

I can see how to set a timer / automation to turn a device on or off at a certain time each day, but I can’t get more granular than that. I want to configure a device to run for 15 minutes each hour.

Any ideas how to accomplish this?

Thanks!

[jkp]

You may want to look at webCoRE

webCoRE Community Forum

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

[mwav3 (Tim)]

Yes was just about to suggest webcore. Would look something like this

[MarkTr]

An alternative to Webcore is to use SmartLighting. Similar to the method I propose in the link below, but you would use one real switch (the device) and one virtual switch, with no scenes involved.

Run Scene Every X Minutes

Most people will say WebCORE. It’s probably the most straightforward way, if you’re already using WebCORE. If you don’t want to mess with that, here’s an approach using Smart Lighting and the scenes you’ve already created: Create two virtual switches I’ll call Red Switch and Green Switch. Create a new Smart Lighting automation that turns on Red and activates your Red scene. Set it to trigger automatically when Green Switch turns off. Create a complementary automation for Green. Set time limit for both so they stop at your chosen hour. Create a Smart Lighting automation using Power Allowance to turn off Red Switch after X minutes. Repeat for Green Switch. Create a Smart Lighting automation to turn Red Switch on at Y time. Now at time Y, Red Switch will turn on. After X minutes, power al…

[Umpiloto (Nick Looper)]

Man, the quick and thorough responses here are amazing!

I started with the virtual device approach, but then decided to jump in all the way with Webcore.

I’ve set up Webcore and linked it to my Github and SmartThings accounts and have created the suggested piston (of course change the device name for the specific one in question.

I’ll come back later and let y’all know how it worked!

[hatallica]

This caught my attention, because this was one of the first things that I did in webCoRE. My pool pump changes speeds for 15 minutes of every hour.

For grins, I moved this automation over to SharpTools recently. They do not have a native way to execute “every hour”, so I got a bit creative with 3 rules:

1. Sets the overall on/off times (basically sunrise/sunset).
2. If speed#2 has been off for 45 minutes, then turn on speed#2.
3. If speed#2 has been on for 15 minutes, then turn off speed#2.

Just one of many ways to approach this.

[Umpiloto (Nick Looper)]

Working perfectly - again, many thanks all