The Zaba-dude is suits me fine. He doesn't have to be too flashy, just intelligible, lol.
I thought I'd share a fix I did the other day that may or may not work.
I have several announcements, revolving around garage and gate actions, that can overlap. The result can be that the announcements are cut off, missing, etc.
I put in a Wait for Expression condition that waits for Chime Status to be "stopped", vs "playing".
I think it works, but I haven't found a way to replicate the problem conditions-only waiting for my wife to come and go in the car. So, I'll have to wait for a few iterations of that before I can declare success.
Here is one rule. I put in a second delay after the built in, attention grabbing sound, 27, Marimba, before the custom spoken notice, 55.
I have one of these devices. What's the best way to queue playing the sounds to ensure each message is played fully and sequentially. I am setting up multiple rules and in testing the sounds are getting cut off. There must be a way to queue events. Anyone?
As above, but along with the Wait for Expression, I threw in another 2 second delay.
There seems to be no overlap now, based on several actual iterations.
Any other way to avoid the waits?
If you use events to trigger sounds, you have to decide whether you want the sound to be triggered immediately or whether you want previous sounds to complete first. Some events might be of such importance that the announcement needs to be made immediately, even if the previous announcement has not yet been completed. For example, if my water leak sensor triggers, I want the alert to be immediate. However, many events can wait a few seconds before being announced.
The post above shows how to use the "WaitFor" expression to allow the previous announcement to be completed before the next one initiates. However, you will have to insert that expression into every rule you wish to wait until the previous announcement is completed.
tldr: hoping for a way to queue events and read them in order to play sounds in order.
What I'd hope for, but don't know if it's available is a sort of message queue with one consumer. The consumer calls the device and plays the sound. So, multiple rules from multiple devices would put messages on the queue and the queue would play in the order the messages were places on the queue.
What I assume you get with say 20 devices with the above approach is 20 rules attempting to play a file and all of those will play in random order based on the timing of the rule and which waiting rule gets inline first after a sound file plays.
I'm new to the platform, but I'm a software engineer. So I have the disability of knowing how this kind of thing can work, but don't immediately gets what's possible with the collection of optional drivers, apps, rules, integrations etc. Thanks.
