I’ve been trying to figure out the logic of this alarm rule and I can’t seem to get it to work.
Basically, what I want to achieve is to set off the alarm siren after 2 minutes if the back door is opened while in the arm-away mode but if I turn off the arm-away mode within 2 minutes, then the alarm will not go off.
Right now, the alarm goes off right away as soon as the back door is open while in arm-away mode.
Can someone help me out? TIA
In your rule design, the flow is immediately executed when the trigger occurs. It immediately looks at the HSM status to see if it has stayed Armed Away for the past 2 minutes.
Here’s one approach that might work… I’ll also leave the discussion open to the community for their feedback as well.
Add Wait
One approach would be to add a 2 minute wait/delay as the first action in your flow. That would mean the rule is triggered when the contact is opened, then it would wait 2 minutes, then it would check if HSM has stayed in the desired status for the last 2 minutes. (If the precision is important here, you might consider making the ‘stays’ duration longer than the wait so you don’t have a race condition – eg. wait 2 minutes, then check stays 2 minutes 10 seconds)
You might even be able to drop the ‘stays’ check on the Armed Away condition check depending on your needs.
Hi Josh,
I went ahead and modified the rule as you suggested but unfortunately, the alarm still went off after the wait/delay.
Did I do it correctly?
Thanks.
Not quite. The delay needs to be the very first action in the Flow.
Otherwise, the logic that I mentioned previously hasn’t really changed with your update. The rule in your screenshot is still triggered immediately when the contact is opened and it immediately checks the HSM status to look back and see if it was your desired value for the past 130 seconds.
The only real change with your update is that after being triggered and immediately looking back to see if the HSM value stayed your desired value, it then waits 2 minutes before turning on the siren… but it had already checked the HSM status immediately (and looked backward) and already decided what action to take… you just told it to wait after that decision was made.
From what I understand, in your case, you want to wait 2 minutes after the contact sensor opens and before you check the HSM state. So the wait needs to come before you check the HSM state.
Oh right. I understand the logic now. Thank you so much for your help. It is working perfectly now.
