Can I use the ST Arduino shield to do perform actions?

I am planning to set up some home awareness monitoring and I think that ST will do me well.

One thing that I would like to do is have some cell alerting under certain circumstances.

Currently I have a GSM shield for my Arduino Uno. I can use this to send SMS texts.

What I am wondering is if I can also add the ST shield and have the Arduino send SMS texts under certain conditions. I don’t want to use the Arduino as a z-wave controller, more like a special type of alarm.

Of course I would need the proper sketch loaded into the Arduino but would this be possible?

Sorry, my grammar in the title was not great. Please forgive me, I am married to a teacher, I should know better.

Hey @chrisf, its completely possible. Our Arduino shield is ZigBee and you can send any message to a device type on the SmartThings side. It can trigger SMS, Push notifications, IFTTT, switches, a lot of things.

Also, you have too many commas in your last sentence :stuck_out_tongue:

Cool thanks! I just wanted to make sure before I dropped the money on the shield. I had previously tried to set up a home security and automation system using only an Arduino, but it got way too complex, and if I wanted to have network capabilities I would be spending a bunch of money for a pretty limited system. This way I can still have SMS alerts in the event of a power loss (with battery backup for the hub and Arduino).

If my Internet went down, any SMS actions that the Arduino is supposed to perform would not happen, right?

So say, my water meter senses water, but the Internet is down due to a storm, I would not get any notification?

@chrisf - yes, you need the connection to the SmartThings cloud to send SMSs through SmartThings. But if you have a GSM shield already, then couldn’t you just use that to send SMS? At least right now, for smart things to do anything, it needs it’s connection to the cloud.

Thats what I am wanting to do, use the Arduino GSM shield to send an SMS. But if my Internet is down, can the SmartThings hub still tell the Arduino to send an SMS?

@chrisf - Oh I see. Then the answer is “no” If the internet is down, ST will not be able to send commands to the Arduino.

All of the “brains” of SmartThings right now is in the cloud, so with no connection to the cloud, nothing can happen. The hub just passes the Z-wave / ZigBee events up to the cloud and the cloud decides what to do based on those events and sends commands back down to the hub to be sent out to the devices. Eventually they want to push some simple things to live on the Hub and thus not require an internet connection to function, but they haven’t developed that functionality yet.