People frequently ask “how can I get a notification if a contact sensor is open for 10 minutes?“ Or “how can I get a notification if my door is unlocked for more than five minutes?“ Etc.
April 2021 Update
This has now been added to the official features when you create an automation using the + in the upper right of the main screen, at least for some devices. You will be able to send either a push notification or a text message.
In case you have a use case/device which does not offer this option in the official features, over the years the community has developed multiple ways of accomplishing this. Some require paying a license fee for third-party app, but then are very easy to use. Others are free but have a more complicated set up.
Because this is 2021, please limit discussion in this thread to methods which will work with the new V3 app.
- RBoy Apps. $40 lifetime license grants access to the entire library.
This is a collection of very popular, highly sophisticated smartapps which work with smartthings and provide many different features and choices.
@rboy , The developer, is very active in this forum as well and gives lots of free advice in addition to answering questions about his products.
The notifications app is: [RELEASE] Door Chimes and Notifications for Doorbells and Sensors
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SharpTools. The SharpTools.io Rule Engine is a highly polished visual interface for building rules and automations. The Rule Engine is free and includes a wide variety of notification options. If you’d like to use SharpTools dashboards, variables, or built-in SMS, you can upgrade to the premium offering. Like Rboy, developer @joshua_lyon is very active in this community and gives lots of free advice here.
Note that there’s also a SharpTools for Android app that provides Tasker plugins, but the SharpTools.io Rule Engine is web based and can be accessed from any modern browser like iOS, Android, and Fire OS.
SharpTools Notification Channels include:
- SMS (Premium, North America)
- Twilio SMS (International)
- Pushbullet
- Pushover
- Device integrations (Sonos, Echo Speaks, Google Cast)
- Webcore. Free community created rules engine. Can do almost anything, but setup can be pretty complicated if you are not used to programming languages. However, it’s very popular and they have their own forum with lots of people who are happy to help if you get stuck.
Here’s the specific “piston“ (Webcore calls their rules “pistons.“)
And if you aren’t familiar with Webcore, here’s the FAQ on that:
FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)
4.Custom Smartapps. Free. @johnconstantelo is a community member who has contributed a set of free smartapps which can do most of the notifications of this type that people are looking for. Basically you are going to copy his code and paste it into your own account and then you will have your own copy of the smartapp to use. So it may look daunting initially, but it’s actually a very simple process. Once you have pasted in the code, it will look like just another automation screen in your smart things mobile app. (This is also true for the Rboy apps option one above.)
Door left unlocked notification (2020) - #5 by johnconstantelo
And here’s a screenshot showing what @johnconstantelo ‘s smartapp looks like once you are ready to create a rule:
So there you have four different ways to do this. I can’t say that any of them have a really easy setup (sharptools is probably the easiest), And they all offer a somewhat different set of features. But in all four cases there are people who will be very happy to help if you get stuck at any point. [quote=“Vincentfhylla, post:1, topic:225200, full:true”]
Trying to figure out how to create a automation that will notify if a contact sensor for a door is left open for more than 5 min. Thank you in advance.
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This was added to the automation creator about a month or so ago. It’s pretty straightforward.
One) choose the + in the upper right of the main screen
2) choose automation
3) For the IF, choose device status
4) select the sensor you want
5) choose open and then select “save” in the upper right
6) Now you will see an option that lets you set a specified period of time. Set that for the time period you want
7) now set up the THEN for the automation and use “notify a member.“ you can send a push notification or a text message.
That should do it. If you need something more complicated, there are other methods, but this one is the most straightforward now.
