tutorials

Create an Announcement
If you have not already done so, create a new Announcements Plugin device. From the main Indigo UI, select the Devices block in the left pane, and then click on New. Give your Announcements device a name and select Device Type: Announcements. For Model, select Announcements Device. The Configure Announcements Device dialog will open. It will look something like this:

If it's a new device, it will not have any announcements listed in the Announcements List. There are three components to any announcement: Name, Announcement and Refresh Interval.

• Name
  Give your announcement a Name. For this exercise, let's use: 'My First Announcement' (without quotes).

• Announcement
  We must now construct the complex announcement (don't worry, the announcement itself does not need to be complex). In the Announcement Field type 'Hello world.' (without quotes).

• Refresh Interval
  In the refresh interval field, let's type '15' (without quotes). This means that we would like the plugin to refresh our announcement every 15 minutes.

If you would like to hear your announcement read aloud, click on the Speak Announcement button. The plugin will also write a copy of the announcement to the Indigo log (the usefulness of this will become more obvious later on.)

If you like your announcement, click on the Save Announcement button. If you have done things correctly, the new announcement will now be listed in the Announcements List. Congratulations! You have made your first announcement. You may create as many announcements as you wish by repeating the steps above.

If you are unhappy with your announcement or would like to improve upon it, click on the announcement in the Announcements List and select Edit Announcement.

• Edit an Announcement
  Let's click on My First Announcement in the Announcements List and then click on the Edit Announcement button. After a moment, the Name, Announcement and Refresh Interval fields should re-populate. You can now make any changes that you would like to the announcement. Let's rename our announcement 'Hello World' (without quotes), as this is more representative of what our announcement says. Make the necessary change to the Name field, and then select Save Announcement. You will notice that the name of the announcement has now changed in the Announcements List.

  Let's click on our Hello World announcement, and select Edit Announcement again. This time, we're going to add some more to our announcement to make it more complex. Let's say we want to announce the current time along with our 'Hello World' announcement. Position your cursor at the end of the Announcement field and type the following characters 'ct:%H:%M' (without quotes) and click on the Speak Announcement button. Whoops. Seems like the announcement generator is quite literal. So we need a way to convey that the next bit of text is a substitution string and we also need to convey what it is that we're substituting with. This is easily done by setting the modifier apart with double greater-than and double less-than characters. But we also need to include a reference to what it is that we're modifying. Let's edit our substitution string by placing these characters in the announcement string like this '<<now, ct:%H:%M>>'. Click the Speak Announcement button again. That's better.

  But it's not entirely helpful as an announcement either, is it? Let's add more to our string to make it more listener friendly. Let's add some more text to have the announcement make even more sense. Edit your announcement string so that the full string looks like this: "Hello world. It's currently <<now, ct:%H:%M>>." (without quotes). That's even better still.

  You can also substitute Indigo device states and variable values using the constructions given at the top of the device dialog box. The 'For Example' announcement string results in a nice, complex announcement. "Good afternoon. It's Tuesday at 3:24 pm. The current temperature is 42 degrees."

Before we forget, let's save our announcement string by selecting the Save Announcement button.

• Delete an Announcement
  To delete an announcement from the Announcements list, select the announcement in the list and click the Delete Announcement button.

  Important! This is permanent and cannot be undone.

• Duplicate an Announcement
  To duplicate an announcement, click on an announcement in the Announcements List and click the Duplicate Announcement button. This will create a new announcement in the Announcements List and the announcement will be appended with 'copy'.

• Clear Fields
  The Clear Fields button will clear the Name, Announcement, and Refresh Interval fields.

  Important! This is permanent and cannot be undone.

You've now successfully created your first announcement.