I am very technically challenged, I’ve tried to get a developer account but it looks like it’s for real developers or teams or businesses. I’m none of those and don’t program at all or have the ability or time to learn. I’m just trying to make my house safer for a disabled and elderly parent.
We have a house full of echo dots and a centrally located google home mini. I purchased the smartthings smoke and co2 detectors to go with our other sensors and lights. Ideally, I wanted to trigger an announcement that there is smoke detected in room name. Alexa does not support that yet so I purchased a fabriq speaker after reading Amazon’s reviews. I’ll probably be returning it after a few days of reading show it’s obvious that this is not the ideal starter project a very tech challenged individual.
Is there another very easy way, without developer accounts to have alexa or a speaker or something announce or play a specific alarm throughout the house if any one of the first alert smoke detectors in smartthings are no longer clear for smoke or co2? I have not been able to trigger all of the devices together if one goes off.
We need to know the exact brand and model of everything you have that will be used for this project.
Specifically:
What country are you in?
Which version of the smartthings app are you using? (Classic or “smartthings (Samsung connect)”)
Model of the smartthings hub?
Exact brand and model of the smoke detectors
As far as the simplest way to do the project you’re describing, it would be to get the Bose 10 speaker and then just use the official “speaker companion“ feature in the smartthings app.
There are other speaker management options that could do it in the official features, but they can’t do it on either in Echo or a google Home, And I don’t know if you want to buy one of the speakers that can do it. That could get pretty expensive. But that would be the easiest method.
This is an officially supported device, so support would be able to help you if you did run into problems. It’s quite popular in the community.
So that’s a pretty straightforward method that doesn’t require any custom code or developer accounts or anything. But it does mean buying speakers.
On the other hand, if you just want to wait a few months, my guess would be that this option will be available for the Amazon echo pretty soon. They’ve now enabled triggering an Amazon routine (not a smartthings routine) from their own echo button or from a contact sensor. And those can speak custom notifications. Once they add more devices classes to use as triggers, you would be all set and could use your existing echoes. There’s just no way of telling exactly when that’s going to happen. It just seems like an obvious future step for them. but time will tell.
I also looked at the speaker companion app. I see where you can change the alarm but Underneath the line “on this speaker player” it reads “none available” in red.
The EchoSpeaks app ([RELEASE] Echo Speaks) will allow you to have the Echos speak a phrase, but you’ll need to have the smoke detector event trigger the announcement. My default for this is WebCore as the code for this is very simple:
