Just curious…
I lock my doors at the mode level but I don’t think I’ve ever set them to unlock at the mode level. I have my back door set to unlock when I arrive at the device level. Sometimes that isn’t successful…so I wondered if mybe I should be instructing to do so at the mode level instead.
I think it just depends on the details of your specific use case.
For example, if you live alone, and you are the only one going in and out, it’s going to be easy to use mode.
However, when you have more than one person living in the house, or you have some people who come and go like a dog walker, it becomes a lot harder to use mode because you may lose the granularity.
Another option is to combine mode plus a presence sensor. So there’s just a lot of variation, again depending on the details of your specific use case.
The granularity makes sense and is why I had it sent at the device level initially.
I do currently live alone and will test moving the command to the mode level.
One thing that sometimes confuses me is if already home I don’t the command to run. if not mistaken I believe hello home director keeps this from happening but I cannot remember how that logic works at the moment.
If the hello home action changes the mode, then nothing in that hello home action will run if the system is already in that mode.
This trips up a lot of people, because intuitively it seems like all the other parts would run and then just the last mode change wouldn’t matter. But it’s just not the way smartthings works. Instead, if there’s a Mode change, the very first thing it does is check to see if you’re already in that mode.
In fact, I think this is probably the most typical granularity problem when you have two people living in the house. It’s really common to set up a hello home action so that when either of the two people arrives home, the door unlocked, and the mode changes to “home.”
The problem is that this will only unlock the door for the first person. Once they arrive and the mode is changed to “home” then the door will not unlock for the second person because the hello home action won’t run since the house is already in “home” mode.
The easiest way to fix this is to split it into two hello home actions. One changes the mode to home when either of the two people arrive. The other unlocks the door when either of the two people arrive, but does not change the mode.
That way when the first person arrives, both of those hello actions run, and the mode gets changed to home and the door unlocked.
When the second person arrives, hello home action that unlocks the door still runs. Hello home action that changes the mode does not run, but it doesn’t matter, because the mode is already set to home.
So again it all comes down to the details of what you want to have happen when.
I totally forgot about the mode vs. hello home action.
I’ve not messed with any of this in awhile. It’s all too easy to forget the logic when not tinkering. I guess that’s a good thing…fairly trouble free for me!
Thank you!
This seems like something that a rule builder really helps with. Lots of “if” statements help to limit when things happen, getting the desired result.