This is my first post, so I apologize for everything in advance. I’ve been using SmartThings very basically for some time and usually I’ve found any assistance in the community but now I’m getting into it a bit more and couldn’t find a way to address this use case.
At a high level, when an alarm goes off on my android phone, I want to flash a light until I snooze or disable the alarm. If snoozed, when the alarm goes off again, I want the same actions to repeat.
So far where I’m at is using Tasker and SharpTools, I have my android alarm directly tied to a virtual switch in ST and this has reliably set the on/off state of the virtual switch properly. Currently I’m only using this virtual switch with a Smart Lighting rule that turns my switched outlet (A new Aeon Smart Switch) on and off with the virtual switch.
What I’m interested in replacing is the Smart Lighting rule with something a bit more intelligent that will flash (turn the outlet on/off at an interval) when the virtual switch is on and immediately turn the outlet off when the virtual switch is off. The closet I’ve tested to that is using The Flasher however once turned on it’s designed to run through the entire flashing routine rather than stop when the triggering sensor changes state which is a nuisance in this case since in order to handle a long waking up period (let’s say an hour) the routine must be very long.
Very cool use case for SharpTools. Thanks for sharing! How do you have your Android Alarm triggering an event in Tasker? I’ve seen some people do it with AlarmPad.
I was going to use AutoAlarm at first but I only saw a way to capture the next alarm event prior to that event happening and I wanted to avoid any delays or missed alarms if the task to capture the next alarm time wasn’t immediately before the task you want to run in which then brings you back to basically setting your alarm time in Tasker and having to modify it each time you modify your alarm.
What I ended up doing is just using the built in Alarm Clock event under Data/Time in Tasker as the trigger and SharpTools to turn my virtual switch on. Then similarly using Alarm Done to trigger the virtual switch off. I did have some issues initially with the Alarm Clock event not triggering which I believe was due to Tasker not being compatible with alarm labels in the Clock app. If I tried to specify a label in Tasker (which the documentation says it supports mind you) then Alarm Clock would never trigger. Without the label specified, any alarm triggers which could be an issue but isn’t in my use case. YMMV.
Using Tasker and SharpTools, I was even able to create a basic light flashing routine which would in fact stop when I dismissed the alarm, but I really want to avoid having the logic in Tasker vs ST where I think it belongs. Certainly if I can flash the lights with 3rd party apps, ST should be able to run a SmartApp doing the same thing having a more direct line of control and information.
The following thread has some details on one approach for having Tasker react to alarms and how to integrate that with SmartThings: (including a video showing the process)
There are several different ways to accomplish this depending on your needs, so if that doesn’t help feel free to tag me.
Thanks Joshua. I’ll check this out. My goal is to be able to trigger smart app ‘Gentle Wakeup’ 30 minutes before my alarm clock goes off. The '30 minutes prior to alarm will likely be a challenge.
I think you’ll be pleased with the topic I linked to as it does exactly that. In the example I provided in the other thread, just change the 5 to a 30 and you should be good to go.
