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

Thanks … I will see what happens using the alternative provided :beer:

The SmartThings Twitter featured an ad that made me smile this morning. I know they’re probably thinking of the marketplace Ready for Rain app that mine is based on, but still…

For anyone interested in smarter pollen/allergen alerts, I recently updated Ready For Nature to allow you to filter alerts based on the ‘Top Allergens’ that Pollen.com lists in its forecasts. So if you are only allergic to specific types of pollen, you can avoid getting pollen index alerts when the current allergens in the air don’t affect you.

To specify what pollen alerts to get, there is a new option in the Ready For Nature configuration where you can type in a keyword to check against the allergens listed in the forecast. In the below example from our house, we’ve entered “Oak” because my wife is allergic to oak pollen. Whatever text you enter will be substring checked (case insensitive) against the allergens list, so if you enter “Maple”, it would match “read maple” and “silver maple”. If you were only allergic to red maple, enter the full string “red maple” and it would ignore “silver maple”.

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Excellent App. Is it possible to make it send Notifications to certain people though? When I select Send Push Notification there is only Yes and No, so it will push to all users on my account. On other Apps I can select from Family Members on who and who should not receive certain types of messages.

Have you tried sending a text message to a specific number? I think you can add more then one number just by adding a coma at the end of each number. If you only want a push notification and not a text you might want to try creating it using WebCoRE.

I wasn’t aware it was possible to send push notifications to select users yet - the Developer Docs say this ability is coming, but not yet enabled. I’d be happy to implement it if I can figure it out. Can you give me some examples of apps that have this feature? If they have publicly accessible code I should be able to figure out how they achieved it and do something similar.

That wouldn’t have worked when you suggested it, but I just committed a change to Github so it will work now. :grin:

I will try the TXT msg thing. Thanks. Here are a couple of apps that can send separate notifications to without having to use WebCore

Device Monitor [RELEASE] Device Monitor - Get Notified if Devices Stop Reporting

Super Notifier is one I use that I can select users in. [RELEASE] Super Notifier - All your alerts in one place!

Also the Notify Me When is another. https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000140766-Notify-Me-When-in-SmartThings-Classic

Here’s a couple screenshots from SuperNotifier

This appears to be using the Contact Book feature that the docs say isn’t available. Interesting.

I haven’t enabled this for my account, and given some of the posts I’ve read this evening about how unofficial the support is, I’m not planning to yet. However, the code to use it is pretty straightforward and I’ve committed the changes that should do what you’re looking for. Please give it a try and let me know if it works or not.

I’d chock that up to the docs being old and incomplete. Contact book was phased in I think to everyone’s account more than a year ago. I remember other folks taking about using it before I could, but also remember it being enabled for everyone. Super Notifier is my app, feel free to use the contact book code in there to make yours work (I borrowed it from somewhere myself, mixed in with the docs’ info). We need contact book support in all the smartapps, super nice to just enter the user info once instead of typing it all over the place.

Has anyone checked if this still works with the recent weather API changes?

@JSchlackman

Actually i can confirm it does appear to be broke after the recent weather changes. Are you working on updates to enable this app to continue to function?

I’ll be taking a look at this soon. SmartThings hasn’t been my main focus lately and I only became aware of the API changes after being pinged here.

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.