Arduino IoT Cloud Scheduler Brings Enhanced Automation to Your Projects
Cloud Scheduler is a brand new feature that’s now live as part of your Arduino Cloud platform. It’s a powerful addition that adds a whole new dimension of automation and control to your projects.
Triggering Schedule Variables
The Cloud Scheduler is a new type of variable. It’s pretty simple, consisting of a couple of elements that, together, are incredibly useful. It mainly boils down to being triggered at a specific time, for a predetermined duration. From those two functions you can automate anything you want, however many times you want, whenever you want.
For example, it can be triggered every 10 minutes and remain on for 10 seconds. Or you could have it trigger for eight hours every day, or even have it switch on for a week before turning itself off.
It’s incredibly flexible, and the whole thing is handled through a simple widget on your Arduino Cloud dashboard. This offers a huge advantage. You can utilize these actions without needing to figure out the complex code to achieve it.
To make sure it’s working correctly no matter where you are, one of the variable types allows you to retrieve (and set) your local time zone. Essential for a schedule that’s triggered at a specific time of day. It also means you don’t need to manually work out your location’s relationship to UTC.
What to do with Cloud Scheduler?
You don’t need much imagination to figure out the usefulness of automatic timers, but let’s ponder a couple of examples nonetheless.
Over on our Docs page for the Cloud Scheduler you can see some excellent use cases. Automating your lights, for instance, or watering a plant at regular intervals. Considering it’s available right now, why not set your Christmas light to automatic with the Cloud Scheduler? Actions and events that can jump into action without the need for any manual input at just the right moment.
And don’t overlook that you can set up multiple schedulers to work together. Whether they’re doing different things at different times, or following on from each other to create a series of connected actions.
It’s all handled through the widgets with dates, times and durations all visible directly on your dashboards. That includes mobile dashboards too, as the Cloud Scheduler is now available for all devices.
As always, we’d love to get your feedback on this cool new feature. Give it a shot and join us on the Arduino Forum to tell us how it went.