Alexa routine when alarm SOUNDS or maybe makerapi to schedule routines?

[giudicistefan]

This is a bit of a hybrid question as it's really in Amazons court, but figure our fine community may have a work around. I need any Alexa alarm SOUNDING to fire off my hubitat rule machine rules. Alexa routines stupidly only have the option to trigger upon DISMISSING the alarm, but the point of my rule is to wake me up if I'm sleeping through the alarm! Until October 31st, my workaround was IFTTT which did include a trigger for the alarm sounding (and turned on a virtual switch which triggered my rule and reset the switch), but the IFTTT Alexa integration is toast now. Any ideas?

Note that the request is specific to Alexa and not alternatives. My phone alarm already does trigger routines successfully but I'm a heavy sleeper with a high pressure job and a deep fear of sleeping through work due to tech issues and Alexa triggering my routines independently is my failsafe if my phone glitches/hangs/bricks on overnight update/explodes.

I suppose I could independently fire rules programmaticly since my phone and hubitat set the times for Alexa and cell phone alarms in the first place since the time changes every day and I use a fixed interval of alarms based on when I actually need to be up (tasker scene asks for final wakeup time then uses makerapi and echo speaks to send voice as text commands to Alexa (wake me up at T am, wake me up at T-15 minutes, wake me up at T-30 minutes). I could maybe find a way to independently use those maker API commands to populate rule machine variables or something to tell rule machine to run the rule at the right times instead of telling Alexa to wake me up and having Alexa alarm sounding trigger the rule. Any ideas on that? Each of the 4 times for the alarms would need to be set only via makerapi if we take that approach

[rwclements228]

Do you have an Alexa alarm set for the same time each day? If that is the case, you can have Hubitat trigger other actions a few minutes after the specified time. For example, you could have your bedroom lights flash on and off.

Another thing you can do is have Alexa set multiple alarms a few minutes apart to insure you do not sleep through the first one, for example 6:00 am, 6:05 and 6:10.

I have multiple Alexa devices and I do use Alexa alarms and reminders. I do use Alexa voice commands to activate devices and rules within Hubitat. , I try to avoid Alexa routines whenever possible. If you can do it within Hubitat rules, try to do it that way.

There are devices that will listen for alarms such as a fire alarm or CO sensor alarm, but I do not know if they would pick up an wake alarm tone from Alexa.

[giudicistefan]

@rwclements228 The alarms change and are set daily programatically, the Alexa alarms are actually set through hubitat via MakerAPI and Echo Speaks. One possibility is if I can make 4 variables for the 4 alarms, and use rule machine to say when time=var1 then [actions], when time=var2 then [actions2] and so on, assuming 1) I can use makerAPI to change a global variable and 2) I can use a global variable as the the time conditional in rule machine. Then my script would set my 4 cell phone alarms, tell makerapi/echo speaks to set my four alexa alarms and populate the four variable times at which Rule machine should run the rules that alexa used to run.

Edit: on first glance, it doesn’t seem like I can use a variable as the time for the trigger of a rule machine rule so that isn’t going to work.

Edit 2: It looks like WebCore can handle this easy peasy. Unfortunate as I’ve managed to stick 100% to Rule Machine since 2017, if I take this approach I’ll have some rules here and some rules there I guess I can have WebCore just turn on a virtual switch and use the virtual switch as a rule machine trigger so at least the rule actions are still in rule machine with the rest of my rules.