A newish sharpTools user here and building automation specialist by trade. I love what you guys have created so far. The addition of variables made all the difference for me so keep up the good work.
The one feature that I could definitely use for my smart home dashboard is the addition of a flashing tile color option for Boolean states. I’m a big fan of the clean dashboard look and use a series of branching dashboard tiles to access different categories and parts of smart home system. I also have variable tiles to represent different states and modes on my main dashboard that change color to signal something like a mode change.
For example… I have “reminders” and “battery Monitor” dashboards that live in my “system” dashboard that I access by way of variable state tiles with a hyperlinks. When a reminder triggers, it “lights up” the reminders tile that then lights up the main “system” tile that is on my main dashboard… so that I know I need to check the reminders. I really wish I had a simple option of making these tiles flash so that it’s more noticeable to household members.
I was able to make a workaround with a webCore rule that made the tile flash on and off with one second intervals but it was sporadic at best and behaved more like a flickering light bulb.
Once again, thank you guys for your hard work… can’t wait to see how this platform evolves over time.
Thanks for the feedback and the example use-cases!
We’ve noted the request and will leave this topic open for further community feedback / interest.
Edit: The Themes and Styles feature was released which supports customization of the tile icon to add various animation effects. Power users can also take advantage of custom CSS for advanced visual effects.
Yes- sounds like a good idea! Our use case is using the tablets as a sort of monitor, and problems that can be made more visually obvious makes that job easier.
I just started with Sharptools myself last week. Love it. I just created a flashing tile using IF-THEN-ELSE statments and nested IF Thens and delays. Works great!
Jay, do you have an example of what you created? I am relatively new to the rules engine but, have been testing my understanding of it. So far working out but a little experienced direction would be helpful.
Cheers
Here is the rule I created. I did some screen shots. Then you just need to set those variables up as Boolean ( true or false). Then creat a tile using the FlashTimer variable and select different colors.
Thanks for the idea… this is a clever work around. Works more reliably then the webCore rule that I had in place. Would be nice to still have a native tile flashing option to simplify things but this will do for now.
Jaywilli, Thanks for the screen shots and I will experiement with this after i fix all the issues with the migration. Your assistance is much appreicated.
Hi Josh. I’m in industrial automation and I am for flashing tiles with the flashing being controlled by a different input (“tag”) than what the tile actually controls or points to.
Hi, just played around with this. To confirm. You would need to do this each time you wanted a flashing tile. So if I wanted one to flash when event A happened, and another when an unrelated event B happened - I would need to set up two independent sets of rules and variables in order to do this.
And then the tile can only be a visual feedback tile? For example if the tile were used to show that the alarm has been triggered by flashing, clicking on it won’t do anything as this will only cause it to switch to its other state, true or false?
The good thing is that playing around with this got me to start looking at rules.
Thanks for bumping this post. I’ve edited my original reply above to indicate that flashing / animated icons are possible with the release of the Themes and Styles feature which supports customization of the tile icon to add various animation effects. Power users can also take advantage of custom CSS for advanced visual effects.
Depends on the tile. A common approach is to use Variables for keeping track of things that are true/false or active/inactive. You can configure variable tiles to use the Hyperlink action and could even pair that with the special $.runRule() syntax to run a rule with whatever logic you desire.
The end result would be a single tile/variable showing your status and then clicking on it could run your desired action within a rule.
Edit: The 
