I am currently using a mix of routines - some in SmartThings, some in SharpTools. For ease of management, I would like to move all the routines over to SmartThings however there are some features in SharpTools that I haven’t found a way of implementing in SmartThings. One of these is the ability to play a ‘chime’ .wav file when a door is opened.
I have the routine set up in SharpTools (and in Webcore prior to the Groovy IDE being discontinued) to:
Play a Chime sound when a door is opened
Wait 3 seconds
Announce ‘Kitchen door opened’
I can announce a door is opened but cannot replicate the chime.
I am using four 8" wall tablets running the Fully Kiosk Browser around the house and in SharpTools, similar to Webcore before it, use the command {“url”:“file:///sdcard/download/chime.mp3”} to play the sound. I have a variety of different sounds that are played in response to different device status changes.
Is there an easy solution to this? I would really like the sounds to play through the wall tablets, as they used to before the Fully Browser DTH was disabled when the Groovy IDE was discontinued. A possible solution instead which I may be able to live with would be to use Alexa to do the announcements. Is that possible and can I get Alexa to play a .wav sound file?
You used to be able to have echo devices play a custom sound file from your music library, but for whatever reason, they removed that a couple of years ago.
In Its place, Amazon added stock sound effects including three or four different doorbell chimes, dogs barking, a bunch of different sound effects. You could check those out and see if they would work for you. But you can only make them play on echo devices, so I don’t know if that helps either.
You can hear what the files sound like by opening the free Amazon Alexa app, going to routines, and choosing “sounds” for the action in the routine. That brings up a menu of the available sound files. So it’s a more limited selection, but a lot of people do use them.
Thanks so much. I had no idea all those sounds were there. In my current system using SmartThings with SharpTools, I can play a sound on all five tablets around the house simultaneously. I can’t see any way of having an Alexa alert play on multiple devices. You have to pick one Alexa enabled device for the sounds to play through. Is that correct? I would have to have each alert, which is a lot, replicated five times to play on each device.
Also is there an easy way of playing the sounds to hear how they sound - like there is on the phone to hear different notification or alarm sounds before they are selected.
