Hi - I have my house alarm sensors connected through Konnected to Smartthings to my Echo Show. I have created a routine where I can get Alexa to announce when a door opens. My question is if there is a way to get Alexa to announce conditionally based on the status of SHM (Armed Away, Armed Stay,
or Disarmed)?
In other words, for example, can I configure the Echo to only have Alexa announce a door opening if SHM is in an Armed state and not announce if SHM is disarmed?
You can also do it without echospeaks by triggering your echo routine from a virtual sensor, and then using logic on the smartthings side to determine when you want the virtual sensor to report.
Another option, using WebCORE instead of Echo Speaks, is to create a virtual contact for the door (or for each door, if you have individual announcements). Change your Alexa routine to trigger on that contact instead of the actual contact. Set up a piston that turns the virtual contact on and off when the real contact opens and closes, but only if SHM is in the appropriate mode. (You can probably do this using an automation in the new app rather than WebCORE but I havenāt tried that yet myself - I might look into it now.) I do the same thing with my āSneak Modeā switch to prevent announcements if weāre bringing sleeping kids in from the car; the extra round trip through the cloud does sometimes delay the announcements noticeably, but thatās not normally critical for me.
You can do it with the official features in either app, including smartlighting, as long as your virtual device has both capability.switch and capability.sensor. That causes it to show up as both a switch and a sensor. When you turn the switch on, the sensor is marked as open. When you turn the switch off, the sensor is marked as closed. So you can turn the switch on and off with pretty much any automation. And it registers to an echo routine as the sensor opening and closing.
Details are in the FAQ, including a link to the code you can use for the virtual device that has both capabilities.