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On Hold: Discussion Open

Radio buttons anyone?

MaxVonEvil 5 years ago in Panels (dashboards) / Special Tiles updated by Alex (ActionTiles) (Co-Founder) 5 years ago 4

Hi, wondering if anyone else are doing something along these lines.

I have several devices for which I wish to offer a set of choices using tiles.

Example 1: Run poolpump at 1200, 2900 or 3450 rpm

Example 2: Run sprinklers for 5, 10 or 20 minutes.

Example 3: Pan outdoor camera to position 1,2,3...N

So far I've manage to McGyver this by creating tiles for virtual switches and having a CASE statement in webcore turn the others off when one is pushed, setting variable values as required (if anyone wants to know how to set it up, contact me separately):


Image 4550



the above all works nicely, but it's slooow. Some times it can take up to 5-8 seconds before the previous button in an emulated radio button set is released as I have to wait for webcore to flip the other switches and do it's thing.

Dear Terry/Alex. Was wondering if you had given though to if it was possible to somehow bring this capability into AT? As I'm sure you'd agree given the few examples above, the possibilities are vast and many.


I suppose that besides my webcore-frankensteining multiple tiles into one radio-button, there are other more neat and efficient ways to implement a selection GUI element (perhaps a single tile offering the equivalent of dropdown selection box?)


However I guess the real question is how to communicate said selection back to smartthings. What if it was agreed to use a custom virtual button/button panel DTH, where the button pressed was equivalent to the selection? Would that make any sense?

Even though this feature request probably would not be around the corner any time soon, I'd love to hear your initial thoughts on it

Thanks,

Max



Discuss & Vote

Hi Max,

This scenario is beautiful and you found a very creative solution, thank you for sharing this.


However, the possibilities are vast and the complexity is tremendous. Most people don't possess the equipment to make use of such complexity and only the top 1% of SmartThings users could possible take advantage of this functionality. Also, SmartThings is moving away from using ad hoc Capabilities, so we don't know if this will even be possible in the future in WebCore or otherwise.


Alternative solutions would be to use Virtual Momentary Button Tiles to issue a fire-and-forget type of command rather than relying on a slow stateful tile.


Thanks

Alex

Alex, thanks for the kudo's, although not entirely sure I'm comfortable qualifying as an automating one-percenter ;) That said, I'm already using the momentary fire/forget button setup for things such as RGBW light profiles and a garage opener switch where I hotwired a zwave switch in parallel with. The challenge with the fire/forget is that it has no state memory, i.e. next time one opens the AT panel one can see what was selecte last.

Thinking beyond the box, the memory limitation could possibly be negated by way of a status tile able ro display a custom message (I believe this has been suggested by others previously). Perhaps such a feature would have a broader appeal if it will still be allowed by ST moving fwd.

Merry Xmas

/Max

Hi Max,

During my last visit to the SDC I have personally discussed the limitations of the Capability model with the SmartThings engineers. We discussed Capability that would allow to display an arbitrary status message. Hopefully it will happen one day.

Merry Christmas

Alex