Scroll down to see screen captures of the Shortcut used in this video.

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Eve Aqua Homekit Smart Sprinkler with Thread – https://geni.us/HKGAquathread

Spring is here and I wanted to improve on my existing watering schedule using the power of Apple Homekit’s Convert to Shortcut’s based automations.

In this video, I go through the details of creating a complex automation that will only water the lawn under the following conditions

– 12pm midnight

– Only on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday’s

– Only if the predicted low temperature is above 5 degrees Celsius

– Only if there’s less than an 80% chance of rain the following day

All of this in a single Apple Homekit automation that will run on your Apple Homehub whether or not you’re home.

Links

The Brad Lloyd Eve Aqua Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVARdY2TMAM

ModernDayTEch Siri Shortcuts Video https://youtu.be/XGgMf34uWhY

Matthew Casinelli https://www.youtube.com/user/MatthewJCassinelli

Ingredients:

Devices:

Contact Sensor

Eve Weather ( with Thread )  (for checking weather ) (future use)

Eve Aqua Sprinkler controller( for watering the lawn ) https://geni.us/HKGAquathread

Apple HomeHub (required for all automations) 

Software:

Home4+ app ( to create the trigger)

Apple Home app – Convert to Shortcut

Automation

First let’s go through the basic logic of this automation

This shows the basic logic of the automation documented in the MindNode application. I find this useful to first write out the automation in this format as it easily let’s me see the nesting conditionals (if statements) which isn’t always so obvious to see within the Apple Shortcuts interface. 

Step 1. 

Create Time-based automation trigger to run at 12:00am every night. 

Step 2. 

Create a list of the weekdays that we’re going to want to water the lawn. This is using the LIST feature in the Shortcuts interface. 

Step 3.

Now that we’ve built a list of days we want to water, we will first check to see if it’s a day we want to water. We do this by using the FORMATED DATE feature in shortcuts and use a custom format to only return the three letter abbreviation for the name of the current weekday.

Step 4. 

Now that we’ve got the three letter abbreviation, we use an IF statement to check whether or not the three letter abbreviation returned by the FORMATTED DATE feature is in the LIST we created in step 2. 

Step 5. 

Assuming that the day was in the list we will now use the Get Current Weather feature to get the weekly forecast for the current location. 

Step 6. 

The GET CURRENT WEATHER shortcut returns a list of weather details for the week ahead. We’re going to grab the first item in the list to gather specific details as we’re starting the automation at 12am ( same day ). If we were starting the automation at 10pm, we may wish to use the item at Index 2 (tomorrow) to check whether or not it’s going to rain the next day. 

Step 7. 

In this step we’re going to check the current temperature to see whether or not it’s below 5C, assuming that I don’t want to water the lawn if it’s close to or below freezing temperature.  We do this by grabbing the TEMPERATURE attribute from the ITEM FROM LIST which we selected in Step 6, and then passing that into an IF statement to evaluate whether or not it’s below 5C. 

Note: I decided eventually to switch from negative logic ( ie. only run the shortcut if it’s NOT below 5C) to positive logic (ie. only run the shortcut if it IS above 5C) in my final shortcut as it just made more sense to stick with doing things if they were TRUE. Hopefully this makes sense. 

Step 8. 

If the temperature is above 5C, then check to see if it’s going to rain tomorrow. We will get the PRECIPITATION CHANCE attribute from the same ITEM FROM LIST we grabbed in step 6 and again evaluate to see if it’s going to rain tomorrow. I arbitrarily picked the number 80% here to define “Yes. It’s going to rain” but you could raise or lower this number to your liking. 

Step 9.

If all the conditions above are found to be TRUE, we will then run the Nightwatering scene which we created in the Eve Home app. This scene is fairly simple and just turns on the Eve Aqua to water the lawn for 30 minutes. I don’t need to define the time in the shortcut to turn off as that’s done automatically as part of the Eve scene. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hopefully seeing the whole logic like this will help you with implementing this shortcut on your own. 

Happy Automating!

Chris