I have some alarms on my phone that sound in the evening for when the kids have to turn off the TV, and later when they need to start getting ready for bed, however, sometimes I’m away from home in the evening, and when I am, I often either have dirty hands or am on a bike, so it’s not ideal to have an alarm go off.
I’d like to have an “alarm” that only sounds if I am at home, and, (if possible), also checks my calendar for certain events. I feel like I should be able to do this with a Shortcuts automation, but there’s no “Sound Alarm” action, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get the built-in alarm sounds for the “Play Sound” action.
Has anyone managed to set up conditional alarms?
You could set a Shortcuts automation to trigger at a specific time and in that have a check for a home condition (WiFi network, location, etc.), check your calendar, etc. Then if all conditions are met, play a sound.
Not quite an alarm (no snooze/stop in the usual way), but perhaps sufficient?
You could create an alarm if you check slightly ahead of time, but I think you can then end up with a bit of a mess with multiple alarms created.
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I’ve been looking at that. I wanted to use the same sounds that the Alarms use because the kids are used to them, but I could test with some other sound to see how it works first then worry about finding MP3s of the actual sounds later.
I’m also trying to think of a way to play a recorded file via a speaker (could be a HomePod) triggered by a shortcut. Eg when the TV is switched on after a certain time (because kids snuck out of bed in the middle of the night to remind them/scare them) or to remind that is time to turn off the TV (as OP requests). Any ideas?
You could have a Shortcuts automation run 5 minutes before you want the alarm to sound and then conditionally set an alarm for 5 minutes later.
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I finally got around do doing something, and this is what I did. The alarms are at 6:55 PM, 7PM, and 7:30 PM, so I created a shortcut that gets all alarms, then loops through them and checks if the alarm name matches a list of “interesting” alarms. If it does, it turns on the alarm if I’m connected to my home wifi, and turns the alarm off if I’m not. Then I set the shortcut to run at 6:50 and 7:25.
When checking the home wifi it checks against a list, so when I go to another “home” I can just add the SSID there and it’ll still work.
I realized after that I could use the arrive at / leave from home trigger and turn off the alarms whenever I leave home, but I come & go several times per day, so that’s more computing than needed.