Got my HE last week, and did the basics - so my switches and controls are all in place and working - very easy to set up.
But now - I want to get more creative to replicate my old Home Brew set-up. Happy to code or tweak as required, but I have some questions - I hope people can point me to some discussions, documents, URLS that set me on the right path.
I appreciate any help anyone can give on the following....
Bank/Publc Holidays
I want some of my rules to deal with public holidays (here in the UK we have a published list of dates). Is this doable in HE? What is the best way of doing this. I was thinking maybe something like a variable which is set when its a select day of the year - but does this mean a separate trigger for each day thats a public holiday in the future?
Away. I am not sure I get the 'away' mode thing - how its set, which parts are ignored, which parts are included. Any pointers?
Email integration - this is the big one for me.
My home alarm system is pretty much black box - but I can get it to email out set status (armed and unarmed) which I can capture. Has anybody ever done an email PICKUP integration - so I can change the mode to Away or back to normal? Options I am thinking of...
a) Direct pickup of email from home server, or a web server etc
b) I can do email pickup on my home server, and then set flags that maybe HE can pick up - such as a status on a intranet page, or a file somewhere, or a SQL database, or anything else
c) Can I interface into HE to change the mode - i,e, if I have a Windows service picking up my emails and I detect a "set" email - can I call a local HE interface of any type to change the mode - OAUTH, or URL call (portaladdress/changemode=Away) type thing?
Randomness
What is the best method of adding Randomness to light controls - say I want to give the house a 'looked in' effect when we are away. I see there is a randomness delay you can add - is that the best way? Is there any guides on this?
I do this with a virtual switch called 'Bank Holiday' (I'm in the UK too)
When this is on, it means we are usually around so some stuff happens differently.
I wrote a program called 'Scheduled Switch' which has a parent container which you add 'childapps' to.
Unfortunately you need to program it for each Bank Holiday
I don't use HSM so can't really help there
I do something similar to this..
I run a helpdesk from home and have the house 'announce' when an email comes in to the helpdesk
I use a dos script to check for email in a certain account and when one arrives it uses 'wget' to call a webpage.. this web page just happens to be a link to a Hubitat virtual switch via 'Maker API' (an in-built program)
Calling this link just turns the switch on (with an auto off, so it's ready for the next email)
Instead of the script, you can, I believe, get outlook to do most of it for you.
I think @Royski uses something similar
There used to be an old app called 'vacation lighting' on SmartThings, which I believe someone ported over to hubitat.
If you search the forums you will probably find it.
This is a bit ambiguous. However, I'll try to break it down as best I can.
Basically, away mode is just like the other modes in that it allows you to set various devices and rules to react and act differently when this mode is set. There are NUMEROUS ways you can set Away mode: Presence, time of day, via rules, etc. Typically, Mode Manager is used to set away (and other modes) based upon different inputs: Presence, time of day/day of week, buttons, and/or switches.
If you can you explain your setup a bit more, I can give you some tips on how to set it up to your environment.
Have you looked at the IFTTT Integration with Google Calendar for your holidays? You could import all of the bank holidays into a Google calendar and then IFTTT could turn on the virtual switch for you automatically when an event starts and off when it ends.
@rob
Now THAT looks really interesting...
Once I have completed work on my super tile suite then I’m going to seriously look into this.
May even host a server on aws somewhere and create a driver & app..
Love the idea of automatically turning on a ‘holiday’ switch due to public holidays..
Creating the json request shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Interpreting the data is just deciding what you want out of it and formatting for the correct output
It looks like a nice easy job
I don't think there is an online database as such, just a set of XML files that describe the rules for the holidays, but I've not looked at it too closely.
I suppose you'd have to refresh the rules from GitHub about once a year, just in case new holidays are added.
Enrico Service 2.0 source code consists of 3 main layers: holiday definitions (folder holiday_library/holiday_defs/), processor of holiday definitions (classes HolidayCalendar and HolidayProcessor) and interfaces to serve public holiday data (folders json, ics and ws). Enrico does not use any database.
I am not sure what I am asking to be honest - new to all of this.
But...
The first thing I did was to delete some of the existing modes and recreate my Own... Weekend, Evening, Night, etc. When I was setting up some rules, it said that Away ignores the setup of these rules/conditions/whatever - so I thought there was some special setting in HE for the Away mode.
Don't confuse Hubitat Safety Monitor (HSM) with Mode. Both use 'away' and they are not a single thing. Mode is just a word, available to be displayed or evaluated in a Rule, or ignored. You can change the 'word' in mode, as you have done.
You can have Mode be: Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner... not even have 'away' and HSM will still function. If you want them to influence one another, you can. But out of the box, they don't.
HSM has different states for the Intrusion side (there's also the custom side and the water side). They are: disarmed, armed away, armed home and armed night. You can use all or none of them if you want. And you can have armedAway tied to the mode Away....but you have to set that linkage up. it's not automatic.
