Newbie with 2 garage doors

Day 1 with my Smartthings system, and I can’t figure out how to do this:

I want a light inside the house to be on whenever either of my two garage doors is open. I have two tilt sensors and a power outlet to plug a lamp into. I see how to have the lamp controlled by the status of one door, but how do I get the lamp to work for either of them, i.e. the lamp is off only when both doors are closed?

This is SmartApp territory for now (until we get more advanced rule-building in place). There are a lot of different ways you could go about this from Modes and Hello, Home phrases to IFTTT.

You can get a notification in this scenario but not turn on a light (without writing the SmartApp) — which would be simple enough. Could even be covered in one of our upcoming SmartApp Workshops.

I asked this question several years ago, and then ended up buying a Vera system instead. That has now died, and I would like to switch to Smartthings. Is this still hard to do?

To recap, if garage A OR garage b is open, light should be on; otherwise light should be off.

Thanks.

This is very easy to do using CoRE (Community’s own Rule Engine - a user-developed SmartApp which you’ll need to install manually, via GitHub integration.) I have a similar use-case in my garage, with 2 garage doors, and garage to kitchen door. In my case, if any of the three doors are open, I turn on the garage overhead light. Then, if all doors are closed, and there is no motion detected inside the garage for 10 minutes, a CoRE Piston (i.e. a rule) turns off the light automatically.

CoRE is incredibly capable and there are a ton of community users willing to help you create CoRE Pistons.

Thanks, Dan. My smartthings hub is on its way from Amazon, and I will give this a try after I learn the lay of the land, i.e. figure out how to find and install smart apps. I’ve converted some of my systems to Apple HomeKit devices, but even this minimal logic is beyond Homekit’s capabilities right now, so I’m happy to hear I can do it with smartthings and my existing zwave hardware.