Schedules in LifX app

I’m curious if anyone else sees the “schedules” in the LifX app to be more like “events” than schedules? Don’t get me wrong, I do love my LifX lights but I find that the schedules to be limited and not really schedules. I can give a time to turn on a light or a group of lights. That is where the “schedule” ends. What I’m interested in seeing is something to the tune of:

Schedule 1: At dusk, turn on group garage at 80% 3000K, then at 22:00 turn off visible light and turn on infrared at 100%, then at dawn turn off group garage.

This is more like a thermostat type of schedule and would “look” better in the app then a list of un-associated events.

As it stands today this translates to:

Schedule 1: At dusk, turn on group garage at 80% 3000K
Schedule 2: At 22:00 turn off visible light and turn on infrared at 100% for group garage ← this doesn’t actually work, so I had to have 2 schedules, one to turn off visible and 1 minute later turn on infrared
Schedule 3: At dawn turn off group garage

Thoughts? Anyone else feeling this?

Thanks,

Frank M.

As a developer who has designed APIs before I’d say that’s more the type of capabilities that an application should have but not an API for a small, distributed device since the limit isn’t network traffic but complexity of the IoT device.

To add it to the device API you’d need to add major complexities to do it correctly which would involve putting a full macro language into the bulbs themselves and significantly more storage.

While I expect that kind of thing could eventually be added to the bulb architecture it would still be a bit of a nightmare to debug when there are problems since you’d be doing remote debugging to a network attached device rather than local.

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Hi @FrankTheTankCO,

Thanks for your feedback. We are currently working on an improved the design of the scheduling UI that addresses many of the concerns that you’ve raised. We want the new versions to be more cohesive and easy to use, while still providing the range of different scheduling options you’ve highlighted in your post. I’ve forwarded your feedback onto our lead designer.

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Yeah, I have to do the same thing as you.

I have:

  1. At 8:00am turn family room lights on, colour red

  2. At 8:01am change the lights back to white (that night, if they are switched on they are white not red!)

  3. At 8:02am turn the family room lights off again.

This is just a simple reminder to the kids that they need to get ready for school, and turn off the TV.

So it works well, but yeah, the lack of complicity in the app stops me from doing all sorts of other cool stuff, as I either can’t be bothered or I don’t want a situation (like the above) where anlight it red for a minute, etc.

In my case, just flashing red a few times at 8:00am (like a ten second alarm) would be enough for me, but impossible to do.

Possibly not the solution you’re looking for, but it’s doable in IFTTT.

I have a “blink my lights blue 5 times” trigger when it’s going to rain

Oh cool. I’ll check it out.

I always found IFTTT needed to be a little more “if this and that then that… and this”.

Like I don’t want it to turn lighters on when I get home - as it may be the middle of the day (or worse, middle of the night when kids are asleep). And I don’t want it turning the lights off when I leave, as others may still be home. So I hope one day it becomes more open and Boolean, and I’ll find a million cool uses. :slight_smile:

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I totally agree with you on the lack of flexibility of IFTTT :neutral_face:
Stringify allows much smarter scenarios but it does not support as many IoT as IFTTT unfortunately (it does support LIFX though)
Stringify lets you create “flows” that you can integrate in Alexa’s routines :sunglasses:

I believe IFTTT has added a similar feature. I don’t use it heavily, so not sure of the details.

If you are not afraid to add a one more app to the mix then you should check out cloud-based apilio or for Android MacroDroid. With MacroDroid and IFTTT you can achieve quite sophisticated automation for LIFX lights.

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RIP Stringify.

They’re gone forever in less than four weeks.