Hi Guys. I finally made the plunge from StaplesConnect (SC) to SmartThings (ST).
I’ve been using SC to simulate a Home Alarm systems for the last two years. Things have worked flawlessly, until the last 2 weeks. Things have started to go “wonky” interacting via the cloud with SC. Also, even thought the event triggered, the system wouldn’t come out of Away. This, coupled with the email I got two weeks ago (interesting timing) that Zonoff shuttered it’s doors, and no-one has any idea what’s going to happen to the webinterface.
Figured it was time to jump ship while it was still easy to exclude all my devices from the webinterface.
So I’ve paired all my devices to ST:
Motion Sensor
Door Sensors
Leak Sensor
Schlage lock
Linear Siren
5 GE Dimmers
2 Ecobee3’s and 2 remote sensors.
And created a bunch of rooms, setup the “Smart Home Monitor”, and defined the Goodbye/I’m Home/Sleep/Awake routines.
Besides some basic automation, I’m primary using to alert for unauthorized access. (I’m not expecting ADT type service, so hopefully I’ve got my expectations low enough)
Things I need help with:
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How do I add the app to my wife’s phone?
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I used to have SC setup to switch to “HOME” when the Schlage lock would open. Essentially by unlocking the door, the alarm would get shut off. This worked amazing, since my wife, kids, and i all used codes. But it also covered the oddball case when my parents would use a key to come into my house. I can’t seem to figure this out using the ST “Smart Home Monitor”
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Schlage lock management. The keycodes were setup via SC. I can’t seem to figure out how to do this with ST.
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The Remote sensors for the Ecobee pickup the motion sensors in the “Smart Home Monitor”, but the motion sensors in the Ecobee itself do not. Thoughts?
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Devices not pairing correctly. My Linear WA105DBZ was paired, but has shown Unavailable since the moment I’ve paired it. Not sure if I paired it correctly. Where can i diagnose this?
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Devices marking themselves “Unavailable” Looks like I’ve walked into the newest crisis of SmartThings. I have two devices listed as Unavailable, that shouldn’t. One is my door lock, and the other is a utilize plug. If I cycle the plug on and off, it seems to come back, so it’s “talking”. Strange, on the door lock, if I hit the lock “tile”, nothing happens. but if I hit the BIG tile, it changes to Locking, and then starts communicating. (The Siren from above might be this status, but it’s 100dba, I’m not setting it off to test this theory)
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Stuck Device. When Pairing/unpairing my devices, I broke one of my door sensors. I replaced it with a spare, but it’s constantly reading Open. (Well, right now it’s Unavailable) anyway to troubleshoot this.
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Camera’s. SC had some of the old Dlink camera’s intergrated (942’s) My wife would view them via the SC app, but that’s all they did. I had moved to Milestone’s Xprotect Go server, with an additional Hikvision camera. What’s a good way to approach this? I’ve seen references to Blue Iris. Xprotect does have an API. All I want is to be able to see the video. Either natively, or launching somethng else. I wasn’t looking to use the camera’s as motion sensors, since that didn’t work so hot with the SC platform (SO Many false positives)
Thanks for the help. The biggest change I can see from SC is that ST has an active community, where SC had none.