it’s easy to have a contact sensor report as a motion sensor, or vice versa… You just use Mike’s universal device type handler. So you can definitely have a zone for zone manager that includes some contact sensors and some motion sensors. Quite a few people are doing that.
however, doing that doesn’t address the basic problem of the OP, which is trying to determine whether someone is walking into the house or out of the house based on which device fired first. Because in a mesh network, there’s no guarantee that the message from one device will arrive before the message from the other if they are very close together.
About two years ago, before Core or web core existed, I solved a somewhat similar problem at my own house by using two devices plus mode to identify whether I was arriving or leaving. But my devices included one presence device, so the approach was different than just A fires and then B.
with regard to your comments about local processing, at the current time the only code that can run locally is the official smartlights feature and a little bit of smart home monitor, plus a specific set of device type handlers provided via SmartThings. Core doesn’t run locally, zone manager doesn’t run locally, virtual devices generally don’t run locally… even routines don’t run locally. So I don’t think there’s any way to address the problem this thread is about and keep all operations local.
