Hi,
Disclaimer: this is a bunch of questions for community and staff - yes - @josh and @James - I’m looking at you
Based on responses to any of the below may cause this thread to transition into a feature request category.
I was tinkering over the weekend with @bptworld’s port of Life360 with states which I am finding useful given two teenagers at our household and the need to keep track of their whereabouts and safety…
So I constructed the prototype dashboard posted below (ignore the color scheme as it is just a prototype) and some of the functionality I would have liked to implement.
-
In order to switch colors on and off for charging state and for wifi connection, I had to modify the driver to add capabilities and translation logic to the driver such as contact and acceleration sensor so that the ‘Active’ field in the Hero tile would react and flip the color accordingly.
-
For speed though, I wanted a few color states - e.g. above 0MPH green, above 45MPH yellow, above 65MPH orange and above 75MPH red. The only way I can currently think of is adding a Temperature Measurement capability and build the logic to replicate the speed attribute as temperature, then use the rules builder in sharptools. Even then, the numeric content would display the ˚ degree symbol which is a throw-off as the temperature measurement tile does not seem to offer an option to hide units?
Now I could go on and on with how fancy my use cases can become and continue to modify (hack) various apps and device drivers but then I would be forking from development threads potentially and cause myself a maintenance nightmare unless respective authors merge my changes into his release schedule. Not to mention the increasing probability of my wife filing for divorce given how much time I am spending on home automation…
While all of this is certainly doable (hopefully not the divorce part), the following questions come to mind:
-
Is temperature measurement the only capability to which the conditional style rule builder is available?
-
Why would the conditional style rule builder not be available for any attribute, at a minimum for the ‘Active’ attribute that is available on a Hero setting tile?
-
Would enhancing the current iimplementation of the conditional style rule builder to address any attribute value chosen and allow the appropriate conditionals (current numerics and operators such as ‘contains’, ‘does not contain’, ‘is empty’, ‘is not empty’ etc.) then set style accordingly not be a broader and more flexible implementation that would lend itself to a variety of use cases in the community?
-
Unrelated (and yet bothering me specifically this weekend), why is the style color picker fixed and sharptools is not using the same color-picker ‘widget’ for picking any color which already exists for the RGB capability combined with a transparency slider?
-
Am I just being stupid and am missing a very simple solution here out of not knowing a current feature in Sharptools and thus wasted all y’all’s time reading this long post?
Clearly I could go on and on with my stream of conciousness here but I’d like to give you the opportunity to respond as well
Thanks for your time, Avi