From Wait to For to frustration :)

#1

about me: New to ST, with basic programming skills.
I put together a few pistons that do basic if then scenarios, trigger IFTTT webhooks and it all works nicely.

Next I wanted to setup an alarm event. the logic is as follows:

  1. If motion changes to active while location mode is not home then Chime,
    Send SMS to my phone,
    wait 30sec (gives me a chance to deactivate),
    Turn on Siren,
    Wait 10 minutes (siren still going…),
    Stop siren (neighbors had enough by now),
    Send SMS that siren was stopped

Wait just didn’t work for me. really couldn’t figure that one out, felt like it does what it wants and just not deterministic or consistent. Gave up and instead just did a simple for loop with No-op. That worked when I had one for loop but when I added a second one only the first one would compete and the second would never finish - it just stops and exits mid way, randomly. I even created my own variable and made sure to initialize it to 1 before each for loop (although i imagine the for initializes the variable) but still couldn’t get it to complete the second For. It just stops at some point during the second for and exits.

any help would be appreciated
thanks

p.s. in the anatomized piston screenshot the my Siren is referred to as Music_Player_1

Piston%20-%202%20for%20loops
Piston - 2 for loops.png1178×972 102 KB

#2

When using WAIT did you setup the TASK CANCELLATION POLICY to NEVER???

#3

Thank you Ike!
your reply made me realize that flow control might be different than what I was assuming. I suspect that what’s going on is that during the piston’s runtime, the motion trigger event ends and that causes the original If statement to evaluate as False. What I’ll do is use a boolean variable to keep the event On/Off state. Hopefully that will solve it. Thanks again for the reply

#4

Yes… It had taken me awhile to understand the flow :)))))
as soon as the condition is false the whole IF block stops…