Any Tasker gurus out there?

[sweenish]

I was initially going to ask for some help, but I realized why my Task was behaving the way it was and I think I have a fix.

So instead, why don't we make this a Tasker sharing slash help thread?

I'll share what I have set up so far. My apps include Tasker, Secure Settings, and AutoLocation.

I have at home and away from home profiles (based on wifi). When I'm away from home, bluetooth is turned off and my geofence monitor is turned on. Vice versa when I arrive. Bluetooth because the only device I connect to is a speaker at home.

I have school and work geofences. When I'm inside them, my media and ringer volumes are saved away and then set to zero. They are restored when I leave.

I use Nova Launcher and have the double tap gesture assigned to a system lock task. The Secure Settings system lock is much more reliable than Tasker's.

When I go to church on Sundays, my phone silences itself based on day of the week and wifi connection.

I'm currently working on a task that shows a dialog box whenever I plug into the headphone jack. There are two buttons that set the volume accordingly for earbuds or something else like my cassette adapter.

That last task is where I was having an issue. Android keeps track of headphone and non-headphone media volume on its own. I was meddling with it and getting weird results. Granted, if I could access that volume easily, I'd still mess with it. I'm still working on it.

What do ATers have going for them?

 

[gorcorps]

I bought the "autovoice" plugin, which basically turns your voice commands into tasker commands which you can of course assign to do whatever you want.

Right now I have it set up to be different profiles. So I can say "OK google... I'm at work" and tasker recognizes "I'm at work" to be a command which puts my phone on vibrate, turns off wifi, and turns off Bluetooth. I have one for "I'm home" and "I'm in the car" which all switch on/off various things that I would want in each situation. People have done similar things w/ location in tasker but I didn't like keeping GPS running all day.

 

[sweenish]

I have been eyeing AutoVoice, AutoNotifications, and AutoRemote. I just haven't thought of tasks that would utilize them yet.

You gave me an idea, though. There are times I need to silence my phone that don't fit within my regular schedule. It could be cool to tell my phone to "run silent, run deep." Using a voice command would be cleaner than a widget. So I may be getting AutoVoice in the very near future.

I'm debating how badly I want to change my lockscreen when I charge my phone. Overlays Pro ($3) integrates with Tasker, and allows for widgets to just appear and take over your lockscreen. I want to to make my lockscreen a giant Battery Widget Reborn that only appears on my lockscreen while I'm charging. I can't test any of that in the free version, though. There's no reliable way to do this with AutoInput without root, and I'm stock.

I experimented with turning off my PIN lock when I'm at home, but that won't work for me since I use Android Pay. I only looked into it because my double tap to lock can't respect Smart Lock, and there doesn't appear to be a way around that.

 

[sweenish]

Bump for extra Tasker goodness.

My old tasks were a mess; I decided to nuke what I had and start over.

Proper prioritization will help me a lot, since a lot of my tasks involve changing and restoring my volume levels. They always got lost and never restored due to poor prioritization.

I also had a scene set up for plugging anything into the 3.5 mm jack. It was okay-looking, but not great. Enter Snackbars for Tasker: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nick.mowen.sceneplugin&hl=en

Much easier to create a beautiful dialog to interact with, and one that looks like it belongs in the OS. I'll edit when I get home with a picture of my new prompt.

I still have some kinks to work out for properly restoring volumes after unplugging, mostly because of how Android behaves when headphones are plugged in.

EDIT: Here's my snackbar prompt:

 

[looper]

I was initially going to ask for some help, but I realized why my Task was behaving the way it was and I think I have a fix.

So instead, why don't we make this a Tasker sharing slash help thread?

I'll share what I have set up so far. My apps include Tasker, Secure Settings, and AutoLocation.

I have at home and away from home profiles (based on wifi). When I'm away from home, bluetooth is turned off and my geofence monitor is turned on. Vice versa when I arrive. Bluetooth because the only device I connect to is a speaker at home.

I have school and work geofences. When I'm inside them, my media and ringer volumes are saved away and then set to zero. They are restored when I leave.

I use Nova Launcher and have the double tap gesture assigned to a system lock task. The Secure Settings system lock is much more reliable than Tasker's.

When I go to church on Sundays, my phone silences itself based on day of the week and wifi connection.

I'm currently working on a task that shows a dialog box whenever I plug into the headphone jack. There are two buttons that set the volume accordingly for earbuds or something else like my cassette adapter.

That last task is where I was having an issue. Android keeps track of headphone and non-headphone media volume on its own. I was meddling with it and getting weird results. Granted, if I could access that volume easily, I'd still mess with it. I'm still working on it.

What do ATers have going for them?

Wow, someday I'll know how to set all this stuff up as you have, on my LG V10. At this point, this is all a bit tricky.

Got the V10 about a week ago. (first smart phone)... I know, I'm very late to the game...

 

[sweenish]

That's why I made the thread, though.

If you have something you want to automate, maybe I or someone else can help. I wouldn't consider myself a guru, but I think I can help automate some basic things.

And I finally remembered to upload the screenshot in my other post.

 

[Jinny]

i've spent a lot of time on tasker trying to perfect auto wifi off and on (to save battery) but never got it to work reliably so I just leave wifi on to trigger home/work profiles.

when i had a car, i used autovoice to read outloud incoming text/whatsapp through the cars speakers. (it'd initiate a bluetooth connection which pauses whatever i'm listening to, then do text to speech). i have a task that plays a tone/vibrate to remind me to lock the car after car is powered off. i also had speech to text working so I could respond to messages, but never really used it that much.

i live in an apt and i'm too cheap to pay for a fob key for my fiance so she has to use the call box to get in. I have a profile that gets triggered when she sends me a keyword from whatsapp. my phone will auto answer when callbox dials me, hold a number on the dialpad to unlock the door downstairs, then disconnect the call. i dont have to interact with the phone at all, comes in handy when i'm busy with other stuff.

 

[gorcorps]

I have been eyeing AutoVoice, AutoNotifications, and AutoRemote. I just haven't thought of tasks that would utilize them yet.

You gave me an idea, though. There are times I need to silence my phone that don't fit within my regular schedule. It could be cool to tell my phone to "run silent, run deep." Using a voice command would be cleaner than a widget. So I may be getting AutoVoice in the very near future.

I'm debating how badly I want to change my lockscreen when I charge my phone. Overlays Pro ($3) integrates with Tasker, and allows for widgets to just appear and take over your lockscreen. I want to to make my lockscreen a giant Battery Widget Reborn that only appears on my lockscreen while I'm charging. I can't test any of that in the free version, though. There's no reliable way to do this with AutoInput without root, and I'm stock.

I experimented with turning off my PIN lock when I'm at home, but that won't work for me since I use Android Pay. I only looked into it because my double tap to lock can't respect Smart Lock, and there doesn't appear to be a way around that.

I have autovoice setup for a couple different profiles. When I say "I'm home" it turns wifi on, disables Bluetooth, and maxes out ringtone. It does the opposite when I say "I'm at work".

I realize I could do this by location, but I wanted to try to get away from having gps on at all times.

 

[core2slow]

I'm really not that anal about trying to overcomplicate things, so all my profiles (16 total) are pretty simple.

A few of them revolve around my work time like:
Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri + From 08:00 til 16:00 ==> Wifi on, Vibrate on, BT on (exit task would be wifi off, vibrate off, bt off)

Since i get home around 7pm, i have a profile for:
Mon,Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri + from 19:00 til 0600 ==> wifi on (wifi off at 0600 because i'm on the road)

The rest are simply individual apps where the tasks are to enable gps on/off, rotate on/off, auto brightness/full brightness, etc etc.

 

[sweenish]

I have autovoice setup for a couple different profiles. When I say "I'm home" it turns wifi on, disables Bluetooth, and maxes out ringtone. It does the opposite when I say "I'm at work".

I realize I could do this by location, but I wanted to try to get away from having gps on at all times.

I tried using AutoVoice commands to max the volume, mostly for navigation. Turns out the Maps voice commands supersedes AutoVoice. So now I just have it max the volume and play a sound (to confirm) whenever I open maps. Which isn't ideal. Sometimes I'm just looking for a place, so the sound playing would be detrimental. I suppose I could just display a toast if it annoys me enough.

I should go back and set up voice commands for silencing and restoring my volumes for special occasions.

I'm really not that anal about trying to overcomplate things, so all my profiles (16 total) are pretty simple.

A few of them revolve around my work time like:
Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri + From 08:00 til 16:00 ==> Wifi on, Vibrate on, BT on (exit task would be wifi off, vibrate off, bt off)

Since i get home around 7pm, i have a profile for:
Mon,Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri + from 19:00 til 0600 ==> wifi on (wifi off at 0600 because i'm on the road)

The rest are simply individual apps where the tasks are to enable gps on/off, rotate on/off, auto brightness/full brightness, etc etc.

Turning Wi-Fi off is intriguing to me, since I rarely connect to other networks if it's not work or school. I might play around with this.

On combining profiles:
I have two church profiles set up; two because the WiFi there is not fantastic. They basically silence my phone if it's Sunday and I'm connected. My former profiles were triggered by "connected + Sunday" and "near + Sunday," respectively. This created a logical OR, but it usually meant that both profiles were active a lot of the time.

I was worried that the two profiles firing at the same time would overwrite my saved volumes, so I added an extra condition to the "near" profile. Basically, if I'm not connected + near + Sunday, it will fire. This allowed me to have the two profiles be a logical XOR. And I'm happy to say it appears to be working. I need to look into how priorities work a little closer to make sure I'm not leaving an opening for my values to get over-written. I think exit tasks always have the highest priority, which would be good for me.

 

[core2slow]

Turning Wi-Fi off is intriguing to me, since I rarely connect to other networks if it's not work or school. I might play around with this.

On combining profiles:
I have two church profiles set up; two because the WiFi there is not fantastic. They basically silence my phone if it's Sunday and I'm connected. My former profiles were triggered by "connected + Sunday" and "near + Sunday," respectively. This created a logical OR, but it usually meant that both profiles were active a lot of the time.

I was worried that the two profiles firing at the same time would overwrite my saved volumes, so I added an extra condition to the "near" profile. Basically, if I'm not connected + near + Sunday, it will fire. This allowed me to have the two profiles be a logical XOR. And I'm happy to say it appears to be working. I need to look into how priorities work a little closer to make sure I'm not leaving an opening for my values to get over-written. I think exit tasks always have the highest priority, which would be good for me.

Exit tasks are fantastic, really. Sure, you'll need to create extra tasks to call such events, but it works so well.

I'd highly suggest toggling the wifi if you know you'll be going to church at a set time. Of course, most of my timed profiles are pretty much concrete so it's easier to manage, but if you have different time of when you go to church and such, then i guess your method of triggering works. I used to edit my build.prop to change the wifi scanning frequency but i just find it cumbersome. If i know that im going to arrive at certain place and at a certain time (work or home), toggling the wifi is most effective in terms of battery life (so it doesn't needlessly scan when you're crawling in the middle of rush hour traffic).

 

[sweenish]

The times change often enough that it would be annoying having to constantly tweak the profile.

I could wrap some of my areas in large geofences so that WiFi gets turned back on for my profiles to trigger. Right now I always keep WiFi and GPS on, it would only benefit to turn WiFi off when I know I'm not using it.

That's going to be quite a few fences, though. Home, work, school, friends, and family.