Wanted to open a new thread and see if there is a better approach to triggering a rule to run at a specific time. I’m still new to how to think about creating event-based rule triggers…
What I’m looking to do (and have found workarounds for many of my use cases…) is to store a time (e.g., “5:10 am”) in a variable and then trigger that rule at that specific time. I don’t want to hardcode these times into the existing rule trigger as the times can change based on user input, other conditions around the house, or other variables.
Some of the things I’d like to do with this include: setting an alarm clock variable that triggers a rule to run at a specific time, triggering evening lighting to come on based on an offset to sunset directed by local weather conditions (figured a workaround for this one), or having a nightly reminder for a laundry schedule sent based on a time variable that adjusts from other actions/conditions.
One example is an alarm clock (whereby the ‘Alarm_Time_3’ changes based on user input with the variable, the day of week, etc.), which can also be set multiple times during the same day.
Another example of triggering of a rule from a variable (which can change hourly based on other conditions such as weather, who is home, week/weekend, etc.) that I’m trying to replace looks like this:
Another is triggering to get weather conditions every :02 past the hour and setting an offset variable (this one seems pretty formulaic and easy to solve, but I welcome a solution):
Since a rule can’t be triggered based on a variable time value, are there other or more efficient ways to trigger a rule other than have a ‘triggering’ rule run ‘every one/two/three minutes’ which sets a variable to true, causing the ‘actioning’ rule to run and set another variable to true/false based on if the current time is within a range of the time variable/the exact time and then flowing the actions only if the variable is true?
Am open to any and all potential solutions.