Push Notification — Our new feature to communicate better with your Prota
Hi, everyone!
We are very pleased to introduce a new feature available for Prota OS: Push Notification.
Let’s imagine that, like a lot of people, you cannot live without your morning coffee before going to work. So, as a smart home lover, you created an automation rule that would activate your coffee machine when it’s 7:15 am. Consequently, you got to ask yourself the same question every day: “Is my coffee indeed being prepared?” It is actually working pretty well, but what if one day, it doesn’t. Forget about your well-scheduled-morning-routine and welcome the messy morning before going to work.
And the more you make your home smart, the more you expect to have those interrogations or daily little anxieties, like, surely, a majority of IoT users. “Are my blinds lowered as scheduled? Is my door closed? I just pushed my Microbot Push remotely, was it actually activated?” And many other questions, probably as many as you have connected devices or automation rules.
The truth is, building your smart home by creating automation rules is one thing, monitoring it every day is another, key one. You would just want and need to check whether everything is working properly, as scheduled or as requested at the moment. Monitoring your smart home can become a critical issue if your devices are somewhat linked to your home security system or for the well-being of your aging parents or grandparents.
Here at Naran, we thought that we can get rid of those daily little anxieties and help you monitoring your smart home by improving the communication between you and your physical devices or other web services. Communication is indeed the foundation of the smart home, without it, no connection, no smartness but just ‘dumb’ devices or isolated smart ones.
How to make this communication even better? You require a link, a bridge between you and your devices. This bridge is Prota, our smart hub, that allows you to communicate with your analog devices and control them. This control will be done through the automation rules or stories, as we call them. A story is a rule that will run automatically based on a pre-configured event(s). For example, you placed a Microbot Push on the interrupter of your coffee machine and created an automation rule for your morning coffee: “When it’s 7:15 am every weekday, Microbot Push makes the coffee”.
The more the communication with Prota (and thus with your devices) is simple and effortless, the better and more convenient your smart home experience will be.
This is why we decided to add a new feature on Prota: Push notification.
What is it?
A Push notification is a pop-up message that appears on your device’s screen without having to enter an application. Like this, you can get alerts for anything you want easily. And the anxiety to get an answer to this fundamental question ‘Did it actually worked?” can be resolved by just one very quick look at your screen.
For example, to get back to our morning coffee concern, you can create a Push notification that informs you when your coffee is being prepared: you get to know that your automation rule is indeed working.
What are the advantages?
- An intrinsic feature
There are already several ways of creating some kind of notifications on Prota OS using other apps such as Email, Slack or Telegram for instance. However, Push Notification is different since it is an intrinsic feature, you do not need to configure another app to create it, thus bringing more convenience.
- Create the Push Notification you want
We do receive a lot of notifications every day from various apps, sometimes useful, sometimes not. With Prota’s new Push Notification feature, you’re the one to decide exactly what kind of notification you want to receive because… you’re the one creating it! So, you won’t get bothered by push news you don’t need. You can get the notification that matters to you as well as its content.
- Choose the recipient
You can pair several smartphones with the same Prota. Therefore, you can create notifications that will be received by the paired smartphones of your choice.
How to set up your notification?
To receive push notifications, you need to register your smartphone to your Prota device. It’s very easy! When you click on your Prota’s access link, your smartphone will be registered automatically with your Prota. Once it is done, your smartphone will appear under ‘Peer Devices’ in the Settings app.
To set your push notification, you need to create a story in Prota Space’s Stories app.
First, you need to set up the event you want to receive the notification for. This is what we call the ‘sensor story’. You can choose whatever you need!
Then, the notification corresponds to the ‘actor story’. You will need to choose ‘mobile’ as the actor and ‘receives a notification’ as the action.
Use cases
Being and having the ability to be informed on Prota and all the interactions taking place within your smart home easily and in a timely manner is important. Following are some use cases that may be useful or give you some ideas on how to create your own Push notification.
- You’re a coffee lover and you need to be informed when your coffee is being prepared.
- You own a Microbot Push that switches the light and would like to be informed of your light’s status. You can set up the notification ‘light on’ or ‘light off’ each time your Push is activated.
- You installed a security system in your home (camera, motion detector…) that is turned on every night and turned off in the morning for example. You can create the notification ‘security system activated’ when it is activated and another one for when it is deactivated. (You will need to use our integration with IFTTT for this story unless your webcam is paired with your Prota hub).
- You’re using Prota hub to ease your aging parents or grandparents’ lives and you’re in charge of monitoring their homes, especially in summer when the weather is very hot. (You will need to use the integration with IFTTT). Receive a notification on your phone when the temperature of your parents’ home is above xx degrees. You will then be able to check up on them or turn on their home’s air conditioner for instance.
- Receive a notification when a new Prota OS update is available. Having an up-to-date Prota OS ensures you the best user experience, we strongly recommend you set such a notification.
When an automation rule fails to work properly, get a notification ‘storyline failed’ to alert you so that you can come up with countermeasures.
What else?
We are already in the development for this feature to support more platforms and soon will add this feature for Android devices as well.
To get help when creating your notification push or get more ideas on how you could you this feature, please refer to Stories Writer in our community.
*Stories Writer is a topic part of Prota Care service. To get more information on Prota Care, please check our article ‘Prota Care — Our new service to build your smart home effortlessly’.
