Auto-off timer for dumb coffee maker
My 20 year old Mr. Coffee maker finally died and so I bought a new cheap/basic Mr. Coffee that just has an on/off switch since it was a great price ($13!). (I freshly grind my beans just seconds before I brew. I have the beans in a vacuum sealed container, but only because my daughter gifted it to me)
The old one had a timer that I had never used... but it also meant that it had an auto-off feature that turned the machine off after 2 hours. This basic one doesn't have the auto-off, so I went to build one.
I plugged the coffee maker into an Eightree Zigbee plug I had laying around.
What I found is that after brewing, the maker drops to near 0 power consumption for almost 2 minutes at a time. So I couldn't just use a simple rule to turn off the plug after 2 hours.
Rather than using a complicated rule to figure this all out, I just added a virtual switch (Coffee Machine Running) and this rule to control it. Basically, it turns the virtual switch on until the Zigbee plug (Coffee machine) reports power as 0 for 3 minutes.
This lets me use a trivial rule to turn off the power to the coffee maker after it's run for too long. I use this rather than csteele's auto_off app as I wanted a notification.
