[OBSOLETE] Ready For Nature - alert for inclement weather when a door/window is open

Quick update: the new weather API methods in SmartThings do not include hourly forecast data, only day/night, so I will need to decide what to do with the ‘hourly’ option in ReadyForNature (sadly one of the more useful bits in my opinion).

My current thinking is that I will adapt to the available data and offer a ‘Daily’ vs ‘Day/Night’ option instead of the current ‘Today’ vs. ‘Next Hour’ option. This only applied to precipitation forecast anyway since neither the pollen API nor the air quality API has ever supplied hourly forecasts.

Open to suggestions if anyone has any feedback on this.

It seems hourly forecasts are available in the TWC API that SmartThings is using, but SmartThings doesn’t provide a method so I’d have to implement the call myself and require the user to obtain an API key. I suspect SmartThings haven’t implemented hourly data calls to reduce the number of requests/minute since pricing goes up the more you use it.

I’ve committed changes to GitHub that should restore rain forecast functionality. Normally I test changes on my own for a few weeks before committing, but given that this is a fix to broken functionality I figured others would find a speedy release more useful. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

The forecast options have been changed from “Today” | “Next Hour” to “Today” | “Next Hour/Part Day” to reflect the fact that hourly forecasts are not available in the new SmartThings weather functions (air quality still uses more timely data). After updating, please check your settings if you were using “Next Hour” previously.

I may revisit this at some point in the future to add an option to use your own API key to get weather data from a source that provides hourly forecasts, in order to restore that functionality. However, I am somewhat loathe to invest a lot of time in it seeing as SmartThings will be tossing all Groovy apps to the wind when they finally switch over to the new platform.

I committed ReadyForNature 1.5 to GitHub today, with the following changes:

  • Enhancement: Added time period options for notifications and audio alerts. No more noisy alerts in the evening!
  • Enhancement: Added a threshold setting so that rain alerts are only sent if the percentage chance of rain meets or exceeds a certain percentage. This should help when being bombarded with notifications all afternoon due to a tiny chance of rain overnight. I recommend setting this to at least 30%, but the default is to have no threshold to maintain the same default behavior as previous versions.
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Anyone know why I can’t get this to work using Echo Speaks as my “music player” for the notifications? I can choose my echo devices, but nothing happens with them when I trigger an alert. My echo devices are working with other applications like “Chimes and Notifications for Doorbells and Sensors”

Note: I do see, in the echo device “Recently” : Sent Playtrackandrestore command to Echo

However, for apps that are working, it says: “Last Speech Test: Porch door was opened”

Thanks!

this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.

I can’t get audio alerts to work, even after modifying the code to support speech synthesis devices.

I couldn’t get it to work with a tts device either, it’s as if the msg isn’t even a string.

Are app and/or SMS notifications working for you? I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of insight to offer as there have been very few problems reported in the past, and I’m juggling work-at-home with looking after a toddler during our state lockdown so don’t have a lot of time on my hands.

Sure, the regular notifications work. But audio notifications don’t work. It reads out some bizarre mishmash of code instead of an actual sentence (string).

I will take a look at it and try to fix it, and then add support for speech synthesis devices after.

I’ve completely redone the audio alerts so that it should now work with amazon echo devices. I’m going to add support for speech synthesis devices also and then will release here.

Here’s my version which supports Amazon Echo devices.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Matvei27/ReadyForNature/master/readyfornature.groovy

edit: the version on my GitHub now supports speech synthesis devices as well.

Hi! I installed PollenThing and AirNow, but all I see in the ST app is a tile that says Pollen Index and one that says Air Quality, and both say they are connected. But neither show a number. What am I doing wrong?

It’s not you. I’m afraid both of these were designed for the now-retired SmartThings Classic app. They do not function in the new SmartThings app and would require a complete re-write to get working. I have no plans for this at this time.

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Thanks. The Device Handler is still useful, as the outputs can be used in Webcore.
I also came across this, that I haven’t tried yet.

While the outputs can be used in WebCore the DTH values also don’t auto-update any more - a separate app has to poll them (they used to do this on their own but the way they did it was undocumented and has stopped working).

Overall it’s broken enough that I don’t recommend using them any more, especially for new setups since they will be killed off completely when all Groovy-based apps and DTHs are shut off later this year.