Here is my piston to let me know if our pets need to be fed. I stuck a SmartThings multi-purpose sensor (ContactSensor18) on the dogfood storage bin lid. I have a Kindle Fire with a virtual/simulated(?) dimmer switch (Dimmer3). If the pets haven’t been fed by the kiddos in past 8 hours, the tile turns red.
This could be simplified a bit but I wanted to try and show the hours since fed with the dimmer % on ActionTiles.
Love it! Care to share how your actiontile settings for dimmer is setup. Mine is adjusting but seems to be going the wrong way. Each change I make I have to wait an hour to find out if i am getting closer
I have the hourly counter incrementing via the piston above, line 31 turns on the switch which causes the tile to change color.
In ActionTiles, Tile type shows Virtual Dimmer Switch:
When switch on, Tile Intention = Warn
When switch off, Tile Intention = Normal
Clever.
What is the reason for the wait then second turn off? And, why fade to 0 in 0 seconds and not just setlevel to?
It was some trickery to make the dimmer % show on the ActionTile while keeping the switch off. It flashes to on briefly. I think I found some example here in the forum for similar use.
Kevin. Thank you. I had mine setup backward. Still don’t have it working quite right. Now that I have my tile setting right it must be something else. Pretty hard to screw up the virtual dimmer so I will cross that one off the list. I too am using the Samsung multipurpose sensor but so many way to set it up. I am only using the main part of the sensor. When the door to the dog food bin is open smartthings registers acceleration. Though I am curious are you using it with both sides (open\close) sensor. I stuck the other side of it to mine to see how that altered things but action tiles is down so I can’t see anything.
My current setup (pre adding both sides of the sensor) after the first hour it would jump to 8% then if nothing happened it appeared to climb a % an hour. If I opened it would jump again by a larger %.
I actually have the sensor in ‘garage door’ mode so it acts as a tilt sensor. This requires the sensor be oriented in a specific way to detect open/close though; it looks funny how it is mounted on food bin but it is hidden in pantry so I don’t mind. Using the contact sensor / magnet should give same result and possibly better mounting.
I do something very similar to @kevin, but I don’t worry about how long it’s been since they dogs have been fed. They are on a pretty good routine of when they get fed in the morning and evening. I also have an ActionTiles display where the Feed the Dogs virtual switch shows red if they have not been fed. I have another piston that will reset the virtual switch. Contact Sensor 6 is a door sensor i have on the pantry door where the dog food is kept. It’s a secondary pantry and we would rarely get in it during the hours I have set up to fire this piston.
I couldn’t figure it out. This coming from the guy who spent an hour trying to figure out how to turn on a switch at a certain time every day. I have come a little way. Here is what I came up with. I have a useless lamp in the family room so I got a RGB wifi bulb and it turn on at x time to remind the kids to feed the dog. I have different colors so I know which kid to yell at. I kept the virtual switch for my action tile.
Just wanted to say thank you. I used the piston example @Josh_Slade shared and modified it a bit. I’m using a SmartThings Multi-sensor and I couldn’t get the orientation attribute to work so I changed it to the Zaxis attribute. I’m using the garage door setting in the DH as well so this may have affected something. I modified the DH as for the multi-sensor to flip around the open/close events and increase the axis sensitivity so the lid only has to be open a tiny bit for it register.
