fossil wadi
I want automations to be able to fire a persistent alert - for example, if the freezer door is left open, then several lights flash red. The catalyst for the question comes in turning them off, preferably automatically (i.e., freezer door left open, alert lights activate, go close the door and lights go off).
So looking for suggestions on efficient and clean ways to do this. I'm not sure if a helper virtual toggle would be useful, or if I should approach this with scenes or scripts or whatnot.
lament barn
You can use a "Repeat Until" loop block to check the door is closed, every time it runs a flash, it won't persist across a HA restart though
mellow gulch
You can use a "Repeat Until" loop block to check the door is closed, every time ...
Add a helper that gets turned on and then it will tolerate a reboot of HA
lament barn
Personally I think for something like this making a helper is unnecessary - especially as if it restarts while triggered, it'll re-trigger the automation within X minutes (however long you are waiting for the door to be open before you start alerting) anyway. The number of times where it is critical that you respond within that X minute period after not responding through all the unknown time before that (plus a power cut/manually restarting HA/whatever which lasted for another unknown length of time) is so close to zero it's not worth considering.
fossil wadi
okay so for more context: when the freezer door is open for more then 10 minutes, I have alerts sent to the TV and Alexa. A few nights ago it was late and the TV was off (trying to do that more), and I missed the notification, and the door was open all night. So I want a prominent and persistent notification on two freezers (but the concept should scale to more, perhaps another freezer and a 'fridge). If I'm home no problem, I can do whatever I need to turn it all off, but if I'm not home, it needs to go off when the door is shut since the WAF won't tolerate the continual obtrusive alert (obtrusive by design). And they said word problems in grade school were useless, they shold have been teaching us to reverse engineer them.
lament barn
OK, so what part of using a "repeat until" action block doesn't work for you?
Trigger it when the door is open for 10 mins, repeat until the door is closed, done