Now that webCoRE has pinned a 31-day shutdown warning to its dashboard, this finally feels real.
I had hoped webCoRE’s developers would announce, “Surprise! We’ve been secretly working on a webCoRE for Edge and it’s now ready to test.” No such luck, I guess.
Given the imminent demise of what must be thousands of our webCoRE pistons, I thought it would be late but helpful to start a discussion about our replacements for webCoRE.
Which webCoRE replacement:
is working for you?
is not working for you?
is in the development pipeline?
has been abandoned?
would you like to see?
PS To Hubitat, Home Assistant, et al. proselytizers, please zip it. We love you, but you needn’t tell us again how fine the water is over there. We’re committed to this Edge conversion.
PPS This discussion initiated a year ago kills the hope that a pretty web front end on the SmartThings Rules API will appear any time soon.
Since you quoted my original post from 9/21/2021, I’m going to chime in. I bailed on ST and hindsight being 20/20, I’m incredibly glad I did. It took two weeks to migrate 80+ devices and 40+ pistons to the solution I mentioned in my original post. And now everything just works.
My Harmony, Blue Iris, MyQ and Alexa integrations work perfectly. No one will push an unexpected update to my hub that will break it or take down my Zigbee devices. My hub doesn’t suddenly go offline or reboot unless I choose to take it offline or reboot it.
I’ve attached the lighting routine that runs each night in my home. It’s been running for years and will likely continue to run for years to come. It takes seconds for me to add or remove devices or make changes. The piston that manages my Blue Iris server is considerably more complex. My point here (see, I do have one) is SmartThings offers nothing remotely as capable as Webcore was and for some people ST is no longer a viable option. Props to those of you slogging through the demise of Groovy. I realized the new ST platform would likely never meet my needs and moved on. For me, it was absolutely the right decision.
Despite my warning, I do appreciate your insight. Props to you for continuing to keep one eye on what we’re doing over here in the never-say-die faction.
I’m running SmartThings in parallel with Hubitat (where webCoRE still thrives). All my physical devices reside on SmartThings, as do the majority of my rules, routines, and scenes. For my dashboard (and a few odd rules), I use SharpTools. For the truly complex automations that neither SmartThings nor SharpTools can manage, I still use webCoRE.
Not proselytizing, just suggesting this doesn’t have to be an either-or solution. I’m happy to cherry-pick from what’s out there. And being in the never-say-die faction doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep my options open.
i’m sticking with ST for now and have tried to simplify my pistons into Automations as best as I can. i do also have Homebridge and use it with Homekit, and will farm out certain tasks to that as well (multiple button press events…i think). i havent started using the new homebridge plugin quite yet as i was hoping to get my devices migrated to edge first. haven’t paid much attention the past month but will be diving in deeper this month.
i did start a second home and am attempting to go full Homekit there. I dont need it to be quite as elaborate, but HomeKit isnt too shabby. I got a separate app called Controller that should be able to handle complex logic (although even the Shortcuts app can handle things like variables).
one thing i use webCoRE for is sending commands to my Samsung TV and Samsung Soundbar. I use it to turn on those devices and set certain inputs, and have some virtual momentary buttons so I can have Alexa trigger them. in Automations, i can change inputs on the TV just fine, but not the Soundbar
as it only lets me change power state and volume. since it’s a wifi/cloud integration with ST, i have no idea if i’ll be able to fix this or not, or if I’ll have to look into some sort of IR blaster as an alternative
