Alexa sees this as a switch therefore, when if I simply say “Alexa, turn off the alarm.” It does… Not good. The last thing I need is an intruder breaking in and immediately disabling my alarm with their voice. The Amazon devices/software are also not very good at excluding devices, so even if I exclude all my alarm devices they show back up. Is there a way to make this setup not look like a switch? I have been using this for over a year now and I love it. It makes bridging my SmartThings and home alarm together a breeze. I would like a voice control system such as Alexa in my home but this makes it a little unsafe. Any help is appreciated.
I personally only allow Alexa to control specific devices. Yes it can be a pain to remember to add something new but to your concern I don’t want it to control certain devices in my household and I prefer to set it up manually. In your SmartThings app, go to Automation\Amazon Echo and unclick the “Allow Alexa to access all devices and routines” and then set which devices you wish to allow.
The other option you have is to remove the switch capability from the device handler and you can remove the off and on functions at the bottom of the device handler as well. The Alarm Handler SmartApp uses disarm, armStay, and armAway functions so it shouldn’t be impacted by this change. If you have other routines, Core/WebCore, or SmartApps integrating with your alarm you may need to update them with other functions other than on/off.
This is extremely good information. I commented the switch capability and the on/off functions. It still works as expected so I am going to pick up an Alexa tonight to see if that alleviates my concerns. I believe it will. I am also going to perform the manual additions of devices. Thank you very much!
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If you decide not to limit the Alexa devices to a manual list you may need to rediscover devices for this change to take affect.
I’m trying to push notification for when the alarm is armed and when the alarm is disarmed. Any suggestions? I’m sure I’m missing something obvious. Thanks in advance.
This use case isn’t implemented in this project. Push notifications are sent when the alarm is alarming. SHM appears to only send notifications on intrusion as well.
You can edit the SmartApp to add this functionality, use the Notify Me When app using the alarm as a switch or use WebCore to send you the notification.
Thanks. Notify Me didn’t seem to work when treating like a switch. I may try Core.
If this project could run the alarmdecoder webapp in tandem somehow, all of the notification stuff is built-in and very granular
I created a webCore and all I see is “Active” for the status. Whether disarmed or armed.
execute
if
Alarm's switch changes
end if;
Send PUSH notification "Alarm has changed state:";
Send PUSH notification "Alarm's $status";
end execute;
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It’s the system tile you want.
Thanks! That was it… so confusing to me.
Is there a way for me to detect whether the chime is off or on? I’d like to turn off door chiming if before 9am and turn it back on after that time.
It appears to just be a toggle from what I can tell.
thanks
@wartski, you are correct that the chime is implemented as a toggle. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to implement a virtual switch and then control the switch via generic scheduling app, such as the default Smart Lighting app. I haven’t tried using Webcore so don’t know if there is something more straightforward in that approach.
@njaslyr, the other option is to simply rename the alarm device handler to something less obvious than “alarm”. You can name it nearly anything you want, as long as you can remember it. For example, you could name it “Trespasser Interuptus”. That would be difficult to guess unless you live in Hogwarts. 
I guess the issue I have is that I don’t know what state the chime is currently in. Thus, I really can’t control it properly. I may get out of sync easily. If the alarm is disarmed before 9am, I want to shut off the chime. However, if the alarm is disarmed after 9am, I don’t want to shut if off.
Perhaps I could always toggle the chime when “arming” … .thus chimeOff. When the alarm is disarmed, I could then check the time and toggle chime if after 9am … chimeOn.
something like that.
I didn’t have time to work up as good example for you, but @d8adrvn 's DTH exposes the msg field as text, which contains CHIME when the alarm chime is on. It would be fairly simple to query the field in webCoRE and know if the chime was on or off.
Create a new attribute on the DH called “chime” as that will get updated with the device.chime value during the create event activity. Its value gets set by the Arduino as it changes.
Don’t expose the switch to Alexa.
@wartski I just added a new attribute called chime to my DH and this immediately worked. It stores the value of the chime tile. Will either be chimeOn or chimeOff.
thanks @ritchierich! I just added
attribute “chime”, "string"
but am not seeing it show up in webCore for use.
But sounds like what I want. I’ll make sure it’s publishing.