OK so I finally figured out that the Dashboard view that I loved so much has been deprecated. I won’t complain about how annoyed I am but I need to replicate a very useful feature. I was able to import ALL the lights in the house there and I would see a high level notification on the dashboard if any of the lights were on. If they were I was able to drill down and see ALL lights and would be able to toggle any one of them. So I am looking for another way to get a consolidated view of ALL lights. Is there a way to do that now?
“It’ll be available in a few weeks…” ST just want us to navigate to each room to see light status like it’s in real life. Why use “smart” when your finger can use the exercise navigating the GUI.
I ended up using the “Rooms” tab to organize my things. ie: all lights are in a room called Lights and all Contact Sensors are in a room called Sensors etc.
All you need now, is when you open the app to land on this tab instead of SHM and you’re all set. (and not only when the app is killing your battery in the background)
Update: oops, it seems like they don’t force you to open the app in SHM, but rather it opens where you left off, which is a step forward. Just need to always come out through your rooms
Yeah… but you still have to drill down to every room to see if anything is on.
The Hue app’s rooms view indicates if any room has lights on by Illuminating that row.
Of course there are kinds of thoughts as to how to implement a “home at a glance” view, but it’s clear this is not a priority for SmartThings (which is frustrating, if not inexplicable).
The funny part is that you shouldn’t need a “holistic view,” if the home automation would work as intended. But then the status of your “things” in a room are not always updated, so you need to go into the “Recently” tab. But that tab doesn’t always have data for the “thing” you were looking for. So yeah…welcome to home automation! I cannot tell you how happy I am that SmartThings offers IDE, because many companies don’t…OR smarttiles for that matter
Aside from the fact that SmartThings status isn’t always accurate, or that it doesn’t always do what it is told, I can’t imagine a smart home without a comprehensive status overview. We had it years ago, yet it was pulled for the"next big thing"… which, of course, hasn’t arrived yet.
We do have Smart Tiles, but IMHO that should not be a requirement.
Try TrendSetter, create a group with all of your lights in it. It has various statuses like Off, Offish, Onish, Mostly On, On, etc. If any of your lights are on it will show Onish or Offish and the button will be a pale green.
Here’s a screenshot of my TrendSetter groups…I have one switch that I have in several groups. Everything in the whole house is off except this one switch, Living Room Lights has 3 switches, one is on. TV Lights has two switches and one is on, All the Kitchen and Living Room Lights has 6 switches and 1 is on. You can use this to turn everything off with one press as well.
SmartTiles is a very popular third party dashboard for SmartThings which is completely customizable, so you can make a dashboard that has only your lights on it if you want to.
You can also change the colors and the tile size. It runs in any web browser, so you can just use it on your phone or put it on a tablet. You will find examples of how people have used it in the following:
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
16
Thanks for recommending SmartTiles, JD!
In the upcoming generation (“V6”), we have easier dashboard creation and cross-linking, so it will be particularly convenient to create a sub-dashboard for just lights, or just security, or just batteries… or whatever custom set or mix-match of device Tiles the user wishes.
