Garbage day reminder

[jessie.slimer]

I've read the handful of posts of people setting up garbage day reminders in RM using day of week as the trigger, or even using variables to change it to garbage and recycle every other week.

My garbage schedule is a little different though, and I'm trying to wrap my head around setting up a rule to notify us for garbage or garbage/recycle day.

We have garbage pickup every Wed, but recycle is only on the first and third Wed of the month. On long months, if the first Wed is one of the first couple of days of the month, we will go two weeks at the end of month into the next month without a recycle pickup, so a simple back and forth variable state won't work.

Is there any way to account for this? Eventually I'd like to mount a couple of rgb lights over each can and have them light red or green to let us know which cans to grab without having to look at the phone.

[sburke781]

I can't think of a way to solve the logic you need, but if you can't get it going, you may want to look at the Google Calendar Search driver as a way to still get the schedule for your bin collection in, requiring manual creation of the calendar.

Thinking about it now, Google may provide something like what you described as a recurring option ... Still, self-contained in HE would still be better.

[sean1]

One of the trigger options is "Periodic Schedule." If you select "Monthly" then you have a "In the week of the month" option to select first week, second week, etc. When you select that, you then get an option to select the specific day of the week.

[jessie.slimer]

Bingo. Thank you. I just set it up, and looks like it will work. The only caveat is that I will have to make 2 seperate rules- one for garbage only, and one for garbage/recycle, because the periodic condition doesn't seem to be in the actions to use for an if/then. No big deal though. This is great.

[terminal3]

In thinking how I would do it, I would trigger every Wednesday and on the first day of the month. This driver might come in handy, when you get into coming up with the final logic. On the first you can see what day of week it is and then set the rest of your monthly schedule from there.

[RELEASE] Date Time Parser driver

Recent discussion on how to ID what day of the week it is in a rule prompted me to want a rule too... (in my case it was garbage cans). Having already done some date/time work with my Meteorological Seasons driver, I wrote this driver this AM to allow me to parse values so I can easily control rules. Initially I was putting the variables list from PHP but then I learned that Java comes up... um. short. At least in pre-defined ways. Update - Fixed 0.2.2 I haven't determined the Pattern for th…

[jshimota]

hi - vested interest here - but use the 'WeekNum' variable and only the odd or even ones to set your rule. heck. I'm going to add a 'odd' or 'even' week number to the driver. that'll simplify!

[jshimota]

If it can help rule creator people - I've added a 'WeekOfYearNumOdd' and 'WeekOfYearNumEven' for comparator in a rule. if your garbage cans get picked up every 2 weeks... works great!

(in HPM driver 'DATE Time Parser')

[jshimota]

Huge thanks for the input of @sburke781 !!! I learned that RM5 doesn't handle Boolean attributes in rules. I've updated my device driver to store all booleans as strings (which actually handles a bit nicer anyway!). Here is a rule to text my phone every 2 weeks on monday that the garbage cans go out.

of course, if you want complexity... nothing to see here... move along.... hehe.

[thebearmay]

Even week/odd week will work for every other week until you have a leap year… (ran into the same issue when I wrote even/odd day switch driver to solve the every other day watering schedule)

[sburke781]

Sounds like you need a rule to alternate a switch week to week....?

[thebearmay]

To be fair, it’s not an issue until 2024 but…

[jshimota]

That brings to lite the '30 days has sept, april... ' thing. Some months have odd days, some don't. Not sure how that gets handled...
I'm adding an 'even/odd' value for the date number similar to week odd/even. maybe that will help. v.0.2.5 coming up - once dmans spider fingers my git repo.

[thebearmay]

I went with even/odd day of the year, and then did an automatic flip if prior day = 365 and current day =1

[jshimota]

Actually - I think this is already solved with my driver - use:
DayOfYearNum : 22

Regardless of day, just check day of year! Which of course lends me to make 'odd/even' option for that too.
v.0.2.6 coming up.

[jshimota]

Okay - Water your Lawn every other day - 2 lines!