Over the last few weeks we’ve released some changes to Adafruit IO, our easy-to-use Internet of Things platform that should be useful to everyone using the platform.

Scheduled Triggers Update

Scheduled triggers now have a much more robust option to scheduling. If you’re familiar with cron scheduling, you’ll be familiar with this new system. You can schedule based on a number of new time and date options. Previusly we allowed scheduling based on increments such as 30 minutes, or 1 week. We now allow thing such as “Tuesdays at 9pm” or “At 2:00 PM, only on Friday”, or “Every 4 hours”, or “At 1:00 PM, every 7 days”.

In addition, scheduled triggers will now account for your time zone if you set it in your Adafruit Account profile. The default time zone is UTC.

Also, previously the only action option was to have a value emailed. We’ve now also added the ability for scheduled triggers to update another feed. An example of this would be to update a feed every 30 minutes with a “RESET” value to reset a system. There are many different possibilities!

Reactive Triggers Update

We’ve also added the ability for reactive triggers to email a value based on the feed that is being acted on, or now you can also update the value of any of your feeds from that trigger. For example, if the ‘humidity’ in your house is > 50%, you could update another, ‘dehumidifier’ feed to set the value to “ON”.

We think these updates are going to be quite useful, and are excited to see what you can come up with. This was a very large change in our system, and we anticipate there could be bugs here and there. Please feel free to report any bugs or issues you run across in our forum.

Trigger Changes

We’ve also made a few changes that span both triggers.

Triggers will be automatically disabled if they fail 5 times in a row. A failure could happen for any number of reasons, but we will add a new message to the triggers to let you know why they failed, as well as email you that the trigger has been disabled.

Emails are now limited to IO+ users (scheduled triggers created before 2020/07/14 are grandfathered and will remain active). This is largely because it costs us money to send emails. Reactive Trigger emails were always IO+ only, but we’ve expanded this to scheduled triggers as well (now that scheduled triggers have the ability to publish to feeds, this is free for all users).

Platform Upgrades

We’ve made some further system changes that should improve the performance of IO for all users. It may not be noticeable, but we are continuing to upgrade our backend systems, and improve performance and stability.

Get in touch with us on the Adafruit IO forums or on Discord if you have any questions.