Would love to hear your feedback about how you are making use of the Siri Shortcuts now that you can use it with Vera Scenes?
I love the idea, I’m currently only using it to arm my alarm, would be 100x more useful if we could also control devices directly! For scenes I’ve been using NFC tags so I can tap my phone on my night stand to run the night time scene where my alarm is armed and all the lights are turned off.
Seems to be a 30 scene limit on how many scenes show up on IOS shortcut app. Do not know how to show the rest if them. Setup a few though and it works great. Definitively in the right direction.
I have created simple scenes to change house modes (with the house mode plugin). Renamed them to Vera home, Vera away, etc. for Siri. Now I have these scenes included as shortcuts with voice command and quick link when I swipe left on iOS home screen. Very happy with these! The same now works on Google home on Android phone, scenes can be synched and renamed. Only limitation on Google home is that I can’t get a button for the scenes.
Adding automation from Siri could be interesting to try, for example geofencing.
When my iPhones alarm is on and it rings in the morning i press snooze😂. Then next time it rings i press turn alarm off.
Then shortcuts run a scene that changes the veras mode from night to home and after that opens a newspaperwebsite i always read in the morning. (And then later shortcuts remins Me to turn on my webasto ThermoCall )
/ Mattias
My 86 year old mother just created a Siri shortcut so she can ask Siri to turn her Christmas Lights on and Off - she is thrilled! Go @adina and team! Seriously, if an 86 year old non-tech mom can create a shortcut and use it, you are doing something right
Background, I installed a Vera 3 in my mothers house many years ago for safety and security (lights come on if she uses the restroom at night, she has a one button push to illuminate the entire exterior of her house if she hears a noise outside - she lives on 100 acres in rural VT, automatically turns down the heat and lights at night, in the morning, brings the heat up and starts her coffee percolator, vacation shuts off her furnace/boiler in the summer, etc). I live 1,000 miles away from her so I have to maintain her automation remotely other than occasional visits where I may add a device or two and/or extend it to her needs. Over time I upgraded her to an Edge and then a Plus - the MiOS/EzLo remote administration capabilities actually make this possible.
This is amazing! Your post filled my heart with joy.
I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season!
Adina is cooking up something even bigger…ssshhhhh…don’t tell anyone
Let’s hope this means Siri shortcut’s for devices🤭
that’s coming anyway…
bigger news!!! :)
for those of you struggling with geofencing (as I was), maybe trying Siri Shortcuts native geofencing would be way better as its built directly into iOS. Could run a scene each time you enter the geofence to turn on a virtual switch saying that you are home and a scene to turn the switch off when you have left the geofence. Haven’t given a try yet but this may be a solid work around for the on-going geofencing issue…
Just had a quick look at this. As far as I can see it’ll only run scenes so an approach would be:
Create a virtual switch for each device
Create a scene to turn that on and off (either toggle or defined state depending on what your desire is)
Set up a reactor to do the logic on those switches
This assumes you want to be using more than one device to control home or away mode. Clearly if you just want to use one, it’s trivial.
C
I’m not quite following. You can also set a separate scene to run when you leave the geofence to have a virtual switch turn off signifying that that person is no longer present. Then use reactor to setup and an ‘and’ statement that if all the virtual switches are set to on (signifying that All household members are present) to do whatever you’d like ie. change house mode. Having just one device would work the same way as I see it.
Edit*
Just realized the issue that if one person is present and the others aren’t that would be the issue. To combat that you could use the ‘xor’ statement which I believe is an and/or statement. Meaning that if one or all virtual switches are on set house mode to home etc.
Maybe I’m over thinking it but playing around there doesn’t seem to be an option to act directly on a device?
You need one (Vera) device for each person.
Each of those Vera devices needs at least one scene to allow the shortcut to control it. You can either toggle it (which I personally would not do) or directly set it (i.e. Arrive at locations > run scent to make switch ‘home’). Direct setting needs two scenes?
So for each idevice you need 1 Vera device, two scenes and then a reactor over all.
What am I missing?
*doh*Of course, one vera device, two scenes.
Or just two scenes: One to set house home, one to set away and then each device can act on it directly.
C
It’s a bit cumbersome for sure, but there will be direct device support added vary shortly to shortcuts for Vera. Don’t know if we can control virtual switches which we should be able too. I wouldn’t mind the initial setup though to have a rock solid geofencing. Currently using the iPhone locator plugin which works great, but the trade off of battery life or slow polling is not really for me. I like instant and quick updates.
I agree.
Just realised my two scenes won’t work without reactor logic, so back to the switches
C
Gonna give it a go tomorrow, lets hope that iOS geofencing is actually reliable
Of Course it Wood work. Its the same setup and logic as with iPhone locator (and Reactor)the diffrens is that iPhone locator is Viritual switches instead and you have scenes to Activate each users virtual switch.
/ Mattias
Didn’t mean to respond directly to you in my above post, but yea in theory it should work. Where Vera geofencing fell apart is its reliability, so instead of using Vera geofencing I thought I’d try iOS native geofence in hopes it would be better.