The rules 1 and 6 can be simply added to your Good Morning and Good Night scenes, or a similar scheduled scene you already use to simply this a bit. You could also leave rule 5 out and just leave it off until someone comes home again. Has the VS1 performed well? Yes, it has. This is in no small part due to it being relatively close to one of my Apple TVs, wherever I place it, and this is critical to a well functioning Bluetooth device. If the reach of Bluetooth 5.0 is as good as they say, then for most people you should have no issues. In fact, even my Zigbee devices have been slow to react on occasion, although it’s a lot rarer than Bluetooth, generally speaking. This level of complexity was something completely absent from HomeKit for a while, but we are starting to get the tools to build these more complex automation rules, although again, it’s not obvious at first glance. For A Sensor Detects Something, you’ll be able to select sensors that report specific events like open/closed, motion/no motion, as well as certain sensors that have values, like temperature or light level. For other sensor types you’ll need to use a third-party app. Here’s how to create HomeKit sensor triggers in third party apps. Here is a good example of more complex logic using multiple automations that was also featured on LeadsRating.com. I have an outdoor water feature that is fully automated through presence and time conditions via an Eve Energy smart plug. This works well as it only turns it on during the day when someone is home and turns it off as required.

won’t understand how to boost your heating. However, you can set up a ‘boost’ command using Siri Shortcuts. Once you’ve done this, it will work alongside HomeKit. Eve filters the available characteristics to those it thinks make sense for the device type. This just helps to keep the list of options a bit cleaner, but it can hide some useful values in certain cases, especially accessories with multiple functions. If you do need to access custom characteristics, then Home+ exposes everything the accessory offers (even more than Controller does), including the ability to do string comparisons. Being the most basic automation type, these are easily created in the Home app. The first step in creating any automation is to select a trigger. The Home app allows almost full use of the trigger types support by HomeKit, with some limitations. Here’s how to create these various trigger actions:

The switch has a 30 minute delay, so it will turn off only if the wind has been below threshold for 30 minutes (because repeated triggers will reset the timer). When it turns off the Fountain is restored IF the day and presence conditions are still valid.

Having an action continue UNTIL something happens or WHILE a condition is true can also be achieved with a dummy switch and multiple triggers. The process is very similar to creating a delay action. It could look something like this:Choose an accessory automation: You’ll now want to select “do you want this trigger to occur when it opens or closes” and based on either a time or people arriving/leaving. Select an accessory from the list. The accessories available will depend on which trigger option you use. However, on a windy day it sprays water all over the place, so I wanted a way to turn it off while it’s too windy. I need to use IFTTT for this particular case as HomeKit doesn’t support wind speed as a sensor input, but the same process would apply for other scenarios with HomeKit supported values.