Hi everyone, I wanted to share a useful tip I discovered while working with the Smart Lighting app. It might seem obvious to some, but it was a revelation for me!
When setting up automations for lights, I noticed that leaving the ‘After this number of minutes’ field blank versus entering ‘0’ made a big difference. Initially, I thought putting ‘0’ in the field was the logical choice for immediate action. However, doing so caused the app to run in the cloud instead of locally.
I stumbled upon this by accident while reviewing my apps in the IDE. I noticed one Smart Lighting app was running locally, while another identical one was in the cloud. The only difference was that the local one had the time field blank, while the cloud-based one had ‘0’ entered. This made me realize that a timer-based automation needs to run in the cloud because it involves a delay.
I think the label could be a bit clearer, maybe something like ‘After this number of minutes (leave blank for immediate action)’. This distinction is important because local execution can be more responsive, especially for quick actions like turning lights on when a door opens.
I hope this tip helps others avoid confusion and optimize their automations! Let me know if you’ve discovered similar nuances in your setup. 