Get Piston State

#1

Is there anyway to get the state of a piston?

Here is what I want to do.

Piston B:
If Piston A = paused
then
Do some Stuff
else if Piston A = running
then
Do other stuff

Is this possible?

#2

What is a use case for this? There is no easy ā€œif piston A is paused thenā€¦ā€

If you are pausing the pistons via the action ā€œpause pistonā€ then you could set a global Boolean variable true/false when paused/running.

If you are just clicking the button to pause then I donā€™t have any ideas for you.

#3

submit a feature request for @ady624 to provide function for access to piston state attributes. :slight_smile:

#4

I second this request, here is a use case exampleā€¦

Piston 1 a laundry monitor piston that sets its own piston state to ACTIVE if either the washing machine or dryer is currently running and IDLE once it stops.

Piston 2 is an away setting piston that monitors presence changing to ā€˜not presentā€™. If everyone in the house leaves and the front door is unlocked, or the garage door is open, or THE LAUNDRY IS ACTIVE, then send a notification.

#5

moved to feature suggestion category

#6

Sorry for taking so long to reply. Work has been killing me lately
Here is my use case. I have tablet controller which I use to control my hue bulbs directly through the Hue bridge. I also have the bulbs in smartThings so I can control them with motion. What I want to do is pause the piston when I touch the tablet. I know I could just create a virtual button and have that turned on/off by my tablet and then the piston A would Pause or resume piston B, but I donā€™t want to maintain all of those virtual buttons.

What Iā€™d like to do is use the External URL generated for the piston to pause or resume the piston. Since I could find no way to send an update via the external URL to pause or resume the piston, I thought I could create another piston that only has an action that would Pause/Resume Piston B.

I thought about doing that, but that can cause a bit of out of sync condition. If piston B fails to update the variable for some reason then piston A wouldnā€™t perform the correct action. I just figured getting the piston State was more exact and leaves no chance for error.

#7

Depending how you are executing the external URL creating another piston to pause/resume could be a single piston for as many pistons you want to pause and resume. Just depends if you are able to attach arguments to the end of the URL or not.

#8

I figured as much but I couldnā€™t find a way to pass arguments either.

#9

How are you executing the URL?

#10

I am using an http gateway in an app called iRule then passing the external URL to the piston. I know how to pass params, but I have no idea how to get the piston to consume the params.

#12

use $args.paramName1, $args.paramName2, ā€¦

#13

So I would put that into an if statement?

I donā€™t suppose you could show me an example, could you?

#14

heres one for ifttt wu pollen count i use ā€¦ if you need more just ask

image
image.png1410Ɨ344 64.1 KB

#15

Iā€™ll give it a shot. Thanks!

#16

sure thing.

#17

@bangali
Without thread hijacking too much - could you either post your WUPollenCount piston to the examples or if its already somewhere drop a link? I am working on something that needs pollen counts for my area - but trying to avoid reinventing the wheel :slight_smile:

Iā€™d like to use the pollen count for some internal home bits, but if i could then take that and push it to my weather site, which I should be able to do a push from WebCore -> myURL for processing I would be one extremely happy (and less sneezy) camper

#18

no other category seems appropriate, so let me just post my response here.

i started working on the pollen count piston using ifttt at the request of an user who asked for an example using http requests. unfortunately after spending a little time on it, i found a couple of things that didnā€™t work for my needs:

  1. ifttt does not provide a way to get current pollen count
  2. if i used ifttt current pollen count rises above to get the current pollen count, i would have to setup 12 applets to get it to trigger every time the pollen count changed to 1 - 12. somehow i couldnt get excited about setting up 12 applets to do this one thing.

so, the piston i have now is still a snippet and not a full fledged example that i would feel good about sharing. there are other parts from the snippet that i shared at link below, in case thats useful for you:

my intent has been to find a pollen api, hopefully freely available, then build an example with that. but, just been distracted with other things.

sorry, i wasnt more helpful.

#19

Thanks ā€“ I have not found a pollen open API ā€¦ been searching a while then gave up ā€¦ if you find one do let me know :wink:

#20

sure thing, will do. :slight_smile:

#21

@bangali hmm this thread has burst my bubble! I was hoping to find a piston which would push a notification to my phone if the pollen count in my area on a particular day was going to be high. But from everything Iā€™ve read it sounds like the issue is a getting a data source with API to get the pollen data - I saw something that may have helped but it was only available in the US and Iā€™m in UK.