App or integration for complex scheduling?

[zuzzy (Chris Holt)]

I know about the scheduling in the ST app and I use WebCore, and I have used several lighting and thermostat schedulers, and I use Alexa scheduling…and Nest scheduling…and so on

Is there any good way for me to schedule everything from one place with a decent UI that doesn’t require me to write a webcore piston that watches a google calendar for events.

There just be something that is like WebCore (aware of all devices and attributes and allows expressions etc to run) but designed just for scheduling.

I want to consolidate about 30 different schedules into one tool - temp setting and on-off-dim would suffice.

Ideally it would have a concept aligned to how outlook does meeting recurrence …of ‘every day’ or ‘every Monday’ … rather than make me to compete a calendar of every event I ever want to trigger.

Or has someone done the integration with google calendar in a nice reusable way?

Cheers

Chris

[zuzzy (Chris Holt)]

Also worth noting that I will be using home assistant soon, integrated with ST, if anyone has any HA ideas that do it

[JDRoberts]

Tagging @mwav3

[mwav3 (Tim)]

I would definitely take a look at Node Red, which is included as an add on with Home Assistant, but will also work with Smartthings. We discussed Node Red on some other threads:

Smartthings and WebCoRE performance question(s)

It sounds like you may still be thinking of the ST hub as a server. It’s often more helpful to just think of it as a router, a box of radios used to send and receive messages from RF devices and the ST cloud. It doesn’t care about the content of the messages. Like a post office, it just delivers the letters, it doesn’t compose the messages or read them and make decisions about what to do next. Node Red may be described as a rules engine, a dashboard, or an app creator depending on the original goal of the person doing the describing. It’s a graphical programming interface (layered over JavaScript) which is used to create If statements for IOT use cases. IBM made the unfortunate decision to describe it as being used to “wire together IOT components,” which is exactly what it doesn’t do, s…

Node-Red and Smartthings

With it looking less likely Voicemonkey is coming back, I found a nice workaround to actually trigger node red flows easily from Webcore, and actually pass a string to the msg.payload from Webcore to Node red. This can be nice to take advantage of using both Webcore and Node red, or gradually switch to Nodered without doing everything at once. First step is to setup Node red of course, then use the Http in node. Create any random URL endpoint you want with method POST. Then use Webcore to make a web request using your internal node red IP address adding on the URL endpoint you put in the HTTP node. The expression you put in the plain text of the POST request in Webcore will be in the message.payload in Node Red. You can then use this to make announcements to Alexa of whatever the exp…

Specifically, there are “palettes” in Node Red that are like little programs that create nodes to link services, like Smarthings devices, Home Assistant Entities, Google, etc together to perform automations. For me there was a steep learning curve at first, but well worth it. I’m sure its something you can take on if you’re already familiar with Webcore and treading into Home Assistant. Once setup, these palletes look very promising. One can use the Google Calendar to trigger automations, the other uses the UI dashboard in Node Red itself to schedule which sounds a lot like what you are looking for.

node-red-contrib-ui-time-scheduler

node-red-node-google

[zuzzy (Chris Holt)]

Sorry for not replying to this yet, I was going to play with node red and provide a useful response on how it goes…but a combination of needy toddler and needy work has put me back a bit! Looks like it’s a good answer though from the posted links!