Hi everyone. I could use some help with a situation.
We have a ST hub at home, with lots of devices on it and now we’re wanting to add another hub, at our lake house to control devices. That part is pretty easy I believe however, here’s where it gets tricky.
We also have friends who co-own our lake house and we’d like to incorporate them into the lake house automation.
I don’t want to share all of our devices, not that I don’t trust them, but we all know how we can mess something up because we weren’t sure which item it was or weren’t paying attention.
We use a joint Alexa app and Alexa dots for voice control of the smart devices, at the lake house. I’d like to be able to add their phones in as presence sensors to trigger automations.
They don’t need to access the ST app or programming, we can use Alexa to manually control devices when we, or they or all of us are at the lake house.
How do I incorporate the second hub, at the lake house, and then add in their iPhones to the lake house only, for use as presence sensors?
1st they need to have their own ST accounts. Each ST location will have separate invites. So you can invite them for the lake house only. This will give them full access to the lake house location and no access to your home location.
You will also want a separate Alexa account for the lake house.
The best way to do it is to create another location for the lake house (oddly enough I also have a second location called lake house ). Then have your friends each create a SmartThings account and you can invite them to be members of the lake house location only. Once they accept the invite, they can turn on location sharing for their phone in the ST app. This will make each of them appear as a Member of the location with a single presence sensor in Routines. And by each person having their own ST account and only inviting them to the lake house location, they won’t be able to access or manage anything in your other location.
You could take a shortcut and have your friends share an account, but it gets a little tricky with building Routines because there will only be a single Member but with two presence sensors, one for each of their phones.
As far as Alexa integration with ST, you can only link a single ST account with a single Alexa account. So, if you are only using Alexa/Echo for voice control of devices or if only a single person is creating Alexa routines for the lake house, you’ll be fine with your current setup. If multiple people will want to make Alexa routines, they will each need to have their own Alexa account and link that to their individual ST accounts.
Awesome, thank you both. That’s what I was thinking but wasn’t sure…
I have separate locations made for our home, my office and for the lake house. So all I need to do is have them create their own account then I send the invite?
I remember having to do this with my wife but I don’t recall the steps and the order in which I did each step.
Once I have it set up, there really isn’t a reason for them to even have to access ST. I’ll handle the automation and for the daily use, when where here, we use Alexa for voice commands. That is when they all stop buying smart devices that don’t work with ST .
Can I make it where they can’t change anything but they could log into the ST app and turn things on and off?
I attached a pic of my “locations” that’s what I need correct?
There is an app called Home Remote that integrates with ST and other systems like Tuya. It could give your partner partial control of what is in your ST system. There is no access to automations.
When you generate the token you can limit what they get access to. The app takes you to the ST token site. So it is pretty easy.
You could setup a separate Alexa account to work with Home Remote but I am not sure how well it would work. I looks like you need to specify the commands spoken in the Home Remote app.
Just to be clear, access tokens can’t filter out the devices that Home Remote accesses and if the ST account is a member of multiple locations, it will have access to all the devices in all locations.
Hmmm…on my Android phone, all the devices were dumped into the Home tab. Even if I add a group and select devices to be that group, those devices still show on the home tab. Am I just being dense?
After I link to ST, I go to + on upper right of home page select add existing and select the devices I want to show. The screen shot I showed above only had 5 devices out of the 250+ devices I have at my 2 locations.
Ok, if I delete the Home tab with all the devices that was created when I linked my ST account, I see I can create new Group tabs with a limited set of devices. It was just confusing. Did you also delete the Home Group tab or was one not created for you?
). Then have your friends each create a SmartThings account and you can invite them to be members of the lake house location only. Once they accept the invite, they can turn on location sharing for their phone in the ST app. This will make each of them appear as a Member of the location with a single presence sensor in Routines. And by each person having their own ST account and only inviting them to the lake house location, they won’t be able to access or manage anything in your other location.
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