Labeled accessories when combined & accessory behavior

[ifeign]

Thanks for your work on this improved litter robot plugin, I just migrated from the other one. While I see the potential in your interpretation of how it should appear in HomeKit, it is a little unintuitive. Would it be possible to add labels to the switches in the combined accessory like this examples?

The next thing is more subjective: personally I find that toggling the device to power down is not all that useful, I never turn my robot off. It would be far more convenient if the main toggle triggered the litter cycle or there was a dedicated cycle switch. With this plugin the only easy way to do so is with a scene that sets the air purifier to manual or a dummy switch + scene. I think you’re trying to squeeze too much in to one accessory, when a combined accessory would work well.

[ryanleesmith]

Thanks for the feedback. I can look into the labels. As far as the behavior, to be honest - I actually spent most of the time going back and forth and figuring out the right accessories/switches for this. At the end of the day, I was really just trying to map it 1:1 - the Litter Robot as a whole is just an Air Purifier accessory, which comes with power and manual/auto switches by default, and those mapped pretty well to the Litter Robot itself. The only thing missing was a "switch" to reset the gauge (I tried looking at a stateless switch, but didn't seem like it was going to work).

In any case, I see where you're coming from as far as what switch/functionality would actually be used more (I agree that turning it off is rare, if ever done) - I'll play around with it this weekend and keep you posted.

[ifeign]

Thanks for looking into this!

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:49 PM Ryan Smith notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. I can look into the labels. As far as the behavior, to be honest - I actually spent most of the time going back and forth and figuring out the right accessories/switches for this. At the end of the day, I was really just trying to map it 1:1 - the Litter Robot as a whole is just an Air Purifier accessory, which comes with power and manual/auto switches by default, and those mapped pretty well to the Litter Robot itself. The only thing missing was a "switch" to reset the gauge (I tried looking at a stateless switch, but didn't seem like it was going to work).

In any case, I see where you're coming from as far as what switch/functionality would actually be used more (I agree that turning it off is rare, if ever done) - I'll play around with it this weekend and keep you posted.

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/ryanleesmith/homebridge-litter-robot-connect/issues/7#issuecomment-632935975, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AHWLHYE5GWOXX7BGW7MPBMLRS36OJANCNFSM4NEW7ESQ .

[aModernGirlMakes]

I have two litter robot and it seems to be working well. I am new to homebridge and this was one of the first things I installed. I did have to quit home on my Mac to get the tiles to update after I cleaned and reset the boxes, but that could be that I was in the app and in Home at the same time. Is the filter really calling out the status of the waste drawer? Wondering why it shouldn't be labeled waste drawer instead of filter?

[ryanleesmith]

@amodernstitch The plugin polls every 5 seconds, but the Home app also caches values internally - to what extent, I am not sure. I can see about force updating the values on every poll. The "filter" has two characteristics: FilterLifeLevel and FilterChangeIndication. FilterLifeLevel is literally the opposite of the gauge you see in the app - as the gauge fills up, the life goes down. The change is based on a separate status provided by the robot itself - there is a code unrelated to the gauge that indicates whether it thinks the drawer is full, and I use that for the change alert. There is no such thing as a "waste drawer" in HomeKit - a filter was the closest alternative.

@ifeign I haven't forgotten about the request, just very busy this week, and was fixing a separate minor bug. The best I can think of is just swapping the current main/power switch on the filter itself to be the gauge reset, and still keeping the Auto/Manual toggle as a way to request a manual cycle, but I'll need to see what happens if you try changing Auto/Manual when the purifier is "off". I don't really have an ETA yet, sorry.

[ifeign]

Thanks for the update!