I have some things in automation where I want to start and restart a timer. Does anyone have good examples or experiences?
What sort of timer? A timer to activate an audible alert, or a visual alert? A timer to trigger some automatic process? A timer just to pause processing in your original automation?
What would be the maximum timer length?
Are you okay confirming starts and resets, e.g. from a notification, or must it be fully automated? What about if the device is locked?
Must the timer purely run on device, or are utilising web services and other hardware options?
Where (app(s)) are your automations running that want to start and reset timers?
How many parallel timers would you require?
Good questions. All options are interesting- first step would be to have a timer that runs for minutes and gives an audible/visual reply (think of play time for my kids). So it is a replacement for the Apple version (Apple has the strange implementation of stop audio playing in the countdown timer making all other usage unreliable.
Secondly I would be interested in a webbased timer then is sync via devices - if something like that is already available.
Okay, for a starter then, take a look at this app which has support for Shortcuts and does not override existing audio.
In terms of a web based timer, depending upon the duration, you could use Shortcuts to trigger a web hook to setup setting something that then fires back a notification to, for example, Pushcut (which can have a variable audio component to the usual visual pop up). You could even have it sent to multiple devices, and it could even send back less intrusive notifications (audio-wise at least) to do things like a five minutes left on an hour’s timer.
If you are happy just with notifications, both Scriptable and Pushcut can set notifications for specific times, so you could calculate the countdown and add the required notifications that way too.
Hopefully that gives you a few starting points on automatable timers.
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