Tasker Integration

[rakstar]

This is pretty awesome and I think you'd all agree.  I created a video tutorial on how to execute Home Buddy scenes through Tasker.  Now you can activate scenes on events you specify -- ex. when your device connects to your home wifi, when you get within a certain radius of a GPS location, when you dock your phone, etc.

Check out my Tips and Tricks page
https://sites.google.com/site/rakstar/homebuddy/tips

Feel free to use this topic to post questions or your experiences with Home Buddy/Tasker integration.

[kd5ftn]

rakstar, this is awesome.

So far, I've used your tutorial and have created two profiles in Tasker. One that fires my "Lights On" scene when I connect to my home wifi network and a second profile that runs my "Lights Off" scene when I disconnect from my home wifi network.

I noticed the "Lights Off" scene was failing. This may be because it was trying to send the data right as the phone was switching network connections to 3G, so I added a short "wait" in tasker that will fire the "Lights Off" scene 10 seconds after it detects I've disconnected from the network.

I've only had this setup for a few hours now, so it's hard to tell if this will be practical for not. If your wifi randomly disconnects/reconnects on your phone while at home, it will trigger the lights to turn off/back on, so that may be pretty undesirable.

All in all, some seriously cool things that can be done when combining Tasker with Homebuddy.

[rakstar]

@kd5ftn Thanks for posting.  This is exactly what I was hoping to get from the community, some actual user experiences.  Perhaps an alternative is to do location based triggers -- so trigger your "Lights Off" scene when you get outside a specific radius of your house.  I'm not sure if this will work better or worse than the wifi-based setup but might be worth a shot.

[kd5ftn]

You're exactly right rakstar, some additional logic would be required to make this function more fluidly. Right now, it's not bullet-proof. There's a few issues.

• No audible confirmation from Home Buddy if the scene has been executed. If homebuddy encounters an error trying to execute a scene, a message will pop up on screen for a second, but if you have your phone in your hand, then there's not really a need for automating this with Tasker.
• WiFi Connection may not be the best way to trigger scenes. I woke up at some point last night to all my lights being on. Apparently my phone dropped my wifi connection and reconnected, triggering the "Lights On" scene. Perhaps additional programming logic & delays in tasker can prevent re-connects from being interpreted as "coming home"

I'm a little hesitant in using Tasker's location-based context for this action. I'm already not satisfied with the battery life on my Evo, and there's got to be some impact from location polling that may shorten my battery life.

Perhaps using bluetooth connection for determining state, or even checking from an always on PC if the device is connected to the network may work better.

I look forward to hearing from others experimentation!

[mario23]

Awesome!!!

I saw this while browsing the Tasker site looking for a solution.

Well done sir!

[mario23]

deleted for redundancy

[mario23]

You're exactly right rakstar, some additional logic would be required to make this function more fluidly. Right now, it's not bullet-proof. There's a few issues.

• No audible confirmation from Home Buddy if the scene has been executed. If homebuddy encounters an error trying to execute a scene, a message will pop up on screen for a second, but if you have your phone in your hand, then there's not really a need for automating this with Tasker.
• WiFi Connection may not be the best way to trigger scenes. I woke up at some point last night to all my lights being on. Apparently my phone dropped my wifi connection and reconnected, triggering the "Lights On" scene. Perhaps additional programming logic & delays in tasker can prevent re-connects from being interpreted as "coming home"

I'm a little hesitant in using Tasker's location-based context for this action. I'm already not satisfied with the battery life on my Evo, and there's got to be some impact from location polling that may shorten my battery life.

Perhaps using bluetooth connection for determining state, or even checking from an always on PC if the device is connected to the network may work better.

I look forward to hearing from others experimentation!

Hey have you rooted your Evo yet?
I'm getting around 26 hours on a charge with a custom rom and kernal.
Just wanted to let you know as I had battery issues as well.

[mario23]

Hey rakstar, can you help me find the scene id number in my setup?
I see a whole lot of text but want to make sure I can figure this out.

I was also curious if you were going to update the app to work with google tv now that we finally have the market on there.

Thanks

[rakstar]

@mario23 First of all, thank you so much for your donation!  I really appreciate it.

You could also use this site, http://jsonlint.com, to make the output a little more readable.  Or just email me your user data and I'll list them out for you.

I just got my Revue update yesterday (good stuff!) so yes I will for sure!  I've actually started on it already but I'm re-writing some other parts as well so it might take a while.

[kgrr]

Definitely awesome.  It seems to work well on my T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S - Vibrant
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[davem2421]

How do I locate the device ID in UI5?

I was playing around with tasker and took a guess at a device ID but I'd like to set something up for a specific task just not sure how to locate that info with the new UI.

very cool by the way!!!

Thanks for sharing

[rakstar]

How do I locate the device ID in UI5?

I was playing around with tasker and took a guess at a device ID but I'd like to set something up for a specific task just not sure how to locate that info with the new UI.

very cool by the way!!!

Thanks for sharing

I have yet to upgrade to UI5 so I can't tell you where to find it in the UI, but if you're familiar with JSON, you can get it from your user data.  Follow the instructions here:

https://sites.google.com/site/rakstar/homebuddy/troubleshooting#user_data

then format the output here:

http://jsonlint.com/

[davem2421]

thanks! will give it a shoot

[mogul]

Just tried this for the first time and it worked great! 

I noticed that Tasker has a bunch of actions for specific apps listed under "3rd Party Actions"... I think if you talk to the author about adding specific support, you could make setup a whole lot easer. For example, in Tasker it would be: "3rd Party Actions > Home Buddy > Trigger Scene > (click magnifying glass) > (pick scene from list)"

Would be awesome!

[Ap15e]

The LSI (Luup System Information) plugin provides device ids and scene ids.