Trying to get Home automation to check the power state of a lamp and send a notification if it's on. "Get Desk Power State" outputs "Yes" when running the action through Shortcuts and testing the automation in the Home app but the action outputs "No" when the automation is run in the background at a time of day. Does anyone know why that is and know of a workaround?
@matthewcassinelli Right but it's not as much the output of the shortcut that's the problem but the output of the "Get Desk Power State" action. Running the shortcut as a Home Automation causes it to take the wrong branch of the if-statement.
@simonbs Ah my mistake, I misunderstood. Assuming it’s all on/in the same state, I wouldn’t know then. Possibly what Aaron said but the Home Hub runs these and it should work regardless.
@simonbs generally apps can’t access HomeKit data in the background so it could be that. When you read in the background, it returns the last value seen by a foregrounded app on the device.
@simonbs Try to remove the "get" block and receive the state of your lamp directly in the condition field of the "if" block. That’s how I do it in my home automations and it usually works.
@simonbs what is your home hub? If it’s an iPad have you tried running it there? I believe automations are running on the hubs and not the devices we would usually test them on.
@simonbs I’ve had stuff like this happen when the device is trying to reconnect to network after waking for the automation. Might be worth popping in a wait at the start of the shortcut, about 5s or so
This is the kind of thing that makes me lose trust in Home and Shortcuts apps, and I have no way of knowing if:
This is working as intended but the “Get state of Home” action isn’t allowed to read some attributes when running in the background for whatever reason.
@aaron_pearce Yeah, it’s really a mess. Apparently, the Home Automation works too if I receive the state of the lamp within the if-statement rather than in a separate action from the Home app 🫨
Receiving the power state from within the if-statement instead of using a separate action from the Home app also seems to work even when using a Home Automation. It's a mess, but I'm happy it seems to work.
Now that the automation works with a lamp and a time of day, I suppose it will also work to read the state of a contact sensor from an automation running when I leave the home.
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