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I’ll post another one to show that hardware doesn’t always have to be involved. Traffic in my area has grown worse and worse over the years I’ve lived here, and I have a ten-minute window in which to drop my kid off to school (7:50am to 8:00 am). Some mornings I’ll leave at 7:20 and we end up sitting at the school for ten minutes. Other mornings I’ll leave at the same time and the kid gets a tardy notice because there was an accident on the interstate.

My solution involves multiple parts.

  1. A rule to poll Waze’s API to get how long the drive is taking right now. You can find the rule as a rule template at Driving Time and Distance using Waze [4.0.0.0;5.9.9.9]. This will populate a Number:Time Item with the amount of time it’s expected to take to drive and a Number:Length Item for the distance. Why the distance? Because if the distance changes from normal, it means Waze is taking me a different route from normal which means traffic is really backed up, and I need to pay attention that I don’t just start heading for the interstate. Note that it’s up to you to set the rule triggers for this rule. Please do not hammer the Waze APIs unnecessarily. I have mine configured with a cron expression and rule conditions to only run once every five minutes between 6:45 and 7:30 on school days.

  2. I have a second rule that triggers when the time Item changes that waits until the arrival time is after 7:49 and sends a notification and a TTS announcement on the smart speakers. I’ve a further limit that it does not announce more than once every ten minutes which means right now it only announces once but when school starts up again I will play with that again.

configuration: {}
triggers:
  - id: "2"
    configuration:
      itemName: School_TravelTime
    type: core.ItemStateUpdateTrigger
conditions: []
actions:
  - inputs: {}
    id: "3"
    configuration:
      type: application/javascript
      script: >
        function getTime(inst) {
          let hour = inst.hour();
          let meridian = "AM"
          if(hour == 12) meridian = 'PM';
          if(hour > 12) {
            hour -= 12;
            meridian = 'PM'
          }
          
          return hour + ":" + String(inst.minute()).padStart(2, '0') + " " + meridian;
        }


        var notificationId = "aaclDriveTime";


        items.School_CheckTime.postUpdate(time.toZDT());


        var currArrivalTime = time.toZDT(items.School_TravelTime);
          
        // Update the item

        var msg = "As of " + getTime(time.toZDT()) + " if you leave for school
        now, you will arrive at " + getTime(currArrivalTime);

        items.School_TravelMessage.postUpdate(msg);


        var timeSinceLast =
        time.Duration.between(cache.private.get("lastReport", () =>
        time.toZDT().minusDays(1)), time.toZDT());

        console.debug("Time since last report is " + timeSinceLast);

        if(currArrivalTime.isAfter(time.toZDT("7:49 am")) &&
        timeSinceLast.compareTo(time.Duration.ofMinutes(10)) > 0) {
          console.info(msg);
          cache.private.put("lastReport", time.toZDT());

          // Announce it's time to leave
          actions.Voice.say(msg, null, "chromecast:audiogroup:21632c10-9553-4136-80c3-21202c34e900"); // all speakers group
          
          // Send the notification
          actions.notificationBuilder(msg).addUserId('rlkoshak@gmail.com')
                                          .withTitle('Time to leave!')
                                          .withIcon('f7:car-fill')
                                          .withOnClickAction('app:android=com.waze')
                                          .withReferenceId(notificationId)
                                          .send();
          
          cache.private.put("timer", actions.ScriptExecution.createTimer(time.toZDT("PT20M"), () => {
            actions.notificationBuilder('cancel notification').withReferenceId(notificationId).hide().send();
          }))
        }
    type: script.ScriptAction
  1. Finally, I’ve a widget that shows the current traffic conditions. It also shows a caption under the map which is the contents of that School_TravelMessage. This gets updated every time the travel time is calculated so I can visually check and quickly see what the commute is going to look like before the announcement.

image
image665×602 121 KB

Note the pin is roughly halfway between my home and the school to center the map where I can see the traffic over the roads I need.

This widget is on the marketplace at Embedded Waze Live Traffic Map Widget. There is also a Google Maps version at Embedded Google Maps Widget which is a good choice if you only care about the one route between two points instead of the general traffic conditions over an area. The Google Maps version requires a Google Developer account and API key. Waze’s API is open and doesn’t require anything.

image
image690×370 102 KB

With 1 through 3 combined I’m able to get a heads-up in the morning and easily check when I need to leave to arrive on time without it being annoying.

Sometimes it’s the little things like this that make all the difference.

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