I got the app working last night and after another tweek this morning, my &today weather worked via VLCThing and Pie Zero. I also updated the child app. Can you mod the constraints to either or? I entered the time fram from 6:30am to 7:10am and Good Mornind!. The reason for this is to failsafve ST failure of time or the mode change. So ether or should fire and not both.
Thanks for great work. The UI needs some more simplification for the common user, however, you can leave as is; for main reason that if a person(s) install this app, That person(s) should already be able to figure out what to do. i.e., is expert mode which is in CoRe for piston creation. A user could build a basic or as advanced Piston for the need.
Love the app. Will try to replace NotifyMe app with your app.
Expanding notifyMe (Speaker Companion) app is why I did it. I wanted to use my CO2 sensors from Netatmo (among other capabilities) and no app was covering them. That, and the ever annoying message cut offs, which every app suffers from, were the two BIG reasons we wrote the app.
If you (or anyone else) have any suggestions how to simplify the UI, I’d like to hear them. The app is packed full of features, but I tried to keep it as minimal as possible. If one just picks a trigger and a speaker, the tts is good to go (by default). But that may not be evident.
Yes, it is on my to do list. I just want to iron out the bugs on existing features before I jump on adding more features. But I agree, the AND/OR for restrictions and triggers would be very helpful.
@Daniel_Edge has suggested a neat feature. An intro sound to be played before the tts message.
His use case:
“One idea I have is to have the audible announcements start with a audible “soft ding”. A sudden announcement from the speakers makes people jump if they aren’t expecting it! My girlfriend thought someone had broken in when I was testing last night”
I thought it was an awesome idea, so I put it in.
Release R.0.0.8 adds an option to play an intro sound before the tts message plays.
Glad you like the idea. I definitely didn’t mean to skip the triggered reports So I fixed that…
About the default type, that category is the “basic” notification. It has no logic around how the message is delivered. It is what I call the “fast lane delivery” of an event using tts. Could be used to gauge the server side lag and to determine the delay that is needed to prevent the “message cut offs”
If you run the R.0.0.8a update, you can enable the intro sound for the triggered reports…
Triggers are OR, restrictions are AND. That’s why it made sense what @lmosenko asked for. It’s on my to do list to allow users to at least pick between AND/OR for both triggers and restrictions.
I’m trying to get SmartThings to announce the time on my Denon Heos speakers, but so far I’ve have had little luck in getting this to work. I previously used Samsung Multiroom speakers (with which I also had little luck in accomplishing this) and moved to the Denon Heos because I had hoped they would work better. So far, I’m having less luck with them than what I had with the Samsungs.
One can add the Samsung speakers as Things, but that is not possible with the Heos Speakers, so I’m using MediaRenderer to add the speakers to the ST system.
At first, I tried making the announcements with webCore. The announcements play fine on the Heos Speakers but play havoc with the currently playing (through the Heos Mobile App) online radio stations. The music is seldom resumed after the announcement, or often the announcement is “resumed” as the music and played repeatedly.
I tried your app, but the results are unfortunately more or less worse than doing it with webCore as music playback is not resumed; I have 4 Heos speakers, but the announcements are often only coming through on 1 or 2 of the speakers. The announcement eithers comes through at different times on the different speakers (sometimes as much as 10 seconds apart); or, even though I have not set a custom volume for the announcements, they often played extremely loud; or sometimes there is an attempt to restart music playback, but instead of playing the music, the announcement is re-played; sometimes the pre-announcement sound is played, other times not and yet other times, only the pre-announcement sound is played, without the message; the message is often not played or is truncated half-way through; sometimes music playback starts when the announcement should come through (i.e. after it was stopped by the previous announcement.)
My first question is what the correct way is to add a new Reminders because at first, my reminders did not play at all. Is on supposed to publish both the parent and child apps during installation?
Do we have to set up the first Reminder from the parent app or the child app, as both are shown in the “My Apps” section (as I had published both during installation?)
Why does music playback not resume, even though the function has been ticked?
I suppose the next question is somewhat off topic, but is the MediaRenderer app the best way of getting the music to play over the Heos Speakers?
Will it work better if music playback of the online radio station is started in some or other way by e.g. webCore, instead of the Heos Mobile App? If so, has anyone managed to play back music on Heos Speakers with webCore?
My Test announcement is set up like this:
Noticed this in the log of one of the HEOS Speakers - don’t know if this tells you anything:
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:57:01: trace poll_()
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:55:19: trace Refresh skipped
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:54:00: trace poll_()
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:52:27: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:52:25: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:52:20: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:51:00: trace poll_()
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:50:28: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:50:15: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
ea83113d-3be6-4984-ac8f-bb8a0dfb01fb 21:50:08: error org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 260; The reference to entity “auth” must end with the ‘;’ delimiter. @ line 228
This sounds nightmarish experience. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do. The play and resume is a device function (nothing more than a simple command on the app side) so you will get pretty much the sane behaviour with any app using this function, including webCoRE. Now things will get even crazier for you with RemindR if you enable play intro. This feature pushes the device to the limit. I had really hard time making it work on Sonos, because the device has a buffer to prevent dual commands being played. Just to give you an idea, the algorithm in RemindR is: if intro enabled, play intro sound, then delay by x seconds then play first tts message. The delay may be adjusted in the code and that may fix the problems you are having where intro sound is sometimes played and sometimes not. You can PM me and we can work together to fine tune the delay.
You must publish both apps, just don’t install the RemindRProfiles. And even if you do, is not a problem. However, both apps will show up in Smart Apps, as you mentioned. Setting up a reminder should always start from the parent. The way you have it in the picture is correct.
I doubt this will make a difference. It goes back to what I said earlier, the way play and resume works is a device problem. Sonos speakers have issues with this function too. They ‘resume’ the song from the begining, for example.
From a quick glance at your speaker logs, those are device errors. I would ask @ule to look into it on the Media Render thread. I am really not familiar with HEOS speakers. They may not even be fully compatible with media render so that may explain the weird behaviour you see…
Thanks for taking the time Bobby. It seems that at this stage, what I wish to do is simply not possible with ST. The nearest solution would be to have two separate sets of speakers - one set for music and the other for announcements and notifications.
“They ‘resume’ the song from the begining, for example.” - I’ve seen the same behaviour with the Heos speakers as well.
Tested. I setup ’ continues to be …’ 2 mins. It would send notification after door was opened 2 mins only. Is it correct?
But I would like to continues to push notification until door is closed, is it possible?
Sure, add retrigger. (you can pick how often and how many times you’d like the retrigger to fire while the door is open). When the door closes, it will stop retriggering regardless of how many times you set it up.
If you get a chance, could you please take a moment to complete this 8-question survey posted by our friend @femwitjava? While question # 8 is not applicable to the EchoSistant’s philosophy about making apps available to the community, we are interested in seeing the results for the other seven questions. Thanks for your help!
So I fixed that…
