Hi everyone, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on that might be of interest to those of you who enjoy tinkering with rules and automation in your smart home setup. As someone who’s been experimenting with the new rules engine, I found myself a bit frustrated with the Paper UI interface. It just felt a bit clunky with all the clicks and dialog boxes, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own IDE using AngularJS 1.x. I know it’s not the latest framework, but it allowed me to leverage some fantastic libraries and existing assets from HABPanel, which really helped speed things up.
I wanted to push the rules engine a bit further, so I explored the idea of chaining rules using the “run rules” action. This worked out surprisingly well, so I integrated it into my project. The result is Flows Builder, a tool that lets you design rules visually using flowcharts. These flowcharts are then compiled into one or more executable rules. It’s still a work in progress, but I think it’s pretty usable already.
For example, here’s how a simple flow might look: when the door opens, it turns on the patio lights and checks if the away mode is active. Depending on that condition, it either triggers an intrusion alert or proceeds to check the day of the week to decide whether to start a weekend playlist or welcome the user home.
While I’m really happy with how it’s shaping up, there are definitely some limitations. Multi-trigger rules, loops, and path merges aren’t supported yet, but I’m hoping to address those in future updates. If anyone has feedback or suggestions, I’d love to hear them! The tool is open-source and licensed under EPL, so feel free to fork it or use it however you see fit.
I’d love to hear if anyone else finds this useful or if there are features you’d like to see added. Happy automating! 