Is there anything out there that can make lights flash, or change color for a period of time when a team scores or wins? Seems like anything like this that ever existed is now obsolete.
1 Like
Wins is easy. Scores may be possible if you can find a source.
In either case you need an RSS feed, or Twitter/X account, or team app that posts the events you want to respond to in a way that makes them easy to search for.
You use that as the “if” and change the lights as that.
Now you need a rules platform that can process that kind of input. SmartThings doesn’t. IFTTT does this very well, so back when it was a free service it was the most popular way to do it. IFTTT can still do it, but now you’ll probably have to pay a monthly fee:
And a video tutorial:
Anyway, now that you know how it’s done, you could write your own program to do it, but that would be a lot of work for most people. Always the same idea: capture the information from a real time source like an RSS feed or a Twitter/X account, then use that to SmartThings (or Phillips hue, or some other means of controlling your lights) to make the lights flash.
There may be a way to do it with the sharptools rules engine, I’m not sure whether it can process RSS feeds or not.
2 Likes
If you have an android phone and you have an app like the one from major-league baseball that send you a notification every time your team scores, you could use Tasker instead of Ifttt for this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/tasker/comments/typxlg/need_help_changing_lights_when_my_team_scores/
So same process.
-
find a real time source of the information. That could be an RSS feed, a Twitter/X account, or an app that sends notifications to your phone.
-
find an intermediary that can receive/search that information and then send a message to whatever controls your lights to have them change. IFTTT has historically been the most popular, but Tasker is another option for people with android phones. And I’m sure there are others as well. Hopefully people using something else will post.
-
have the controller for your lights change them. This is almost always easiest with the Phillips Hue bridge., but it may be possible with some other models as well.
Here’s an easy one for people with iOS devices. It works for NFL football, MLB baseball, and then a mix of some other team/sports, including some hockey and some soccer teams. But not for basketball. It has an annual cost of about five dollars per sport, although some are only three dollars
You need to have your lights on a Hue bridge.
This app is easy to use: you just pick your team, and then it has all kinds of lighting and sound effects. However, historically it has stopped working from time to time, probably because one of the newsfeeds changed its format, and the author didn’t keep up with the changes immediately.
Thank you, that is going to be a pretty big lift learning how to use Tasker from the looks of it. Something to do in the free time I suppose.
1 Like
There may be a similar app for Android, So you could check the play store. The trick is finding a source for the information, that’s easier for some teams than others.
The author of the Sports Lights for Philips Hue has a version for football, but it was published several years ago and reviews say it’s not working.
1 Like
There use to be an NHL solution as a groovy smart app but that went away, I think there are solutions in Habitat.
1 Like
You can make HTTP Requests using SharpTools rules. Typically these would be used to interact with APIs that would return a JSON response though.
We don’t currently parse XML / RSS responses, but if there’s enough community interest, it’s something that could be added.
Side Note: It’s outside the scope of this particular discussion, but we have community members who make HTTP requests which return lightweight XML responses and then use our expression feature to parse out just the data they need.
There’s also a bit of a timing challenge here too. For sports scores, you would ideally want it to be somewhat realtime in nature. Many of the sports APIs that are out there lag quite a bit from the realtime game (at least without expensive licensing).
Add in polling to that and you potentially have even longer delays. An event driven approach would really be ideal here, but I’m not aware of any Sports APIs that provide WebHooks.
4 Likes