Holy Moly - has SmartThings come a long way

[JDRoberts]

Welcome!

You’ve gotten some great pointers already, so I’ll just call out 4resources you might find of interest.

1. Welcome letter for those with a strong technical background:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Welcome_FAQ

2. Brief FAQ on using custom code in SmartThings, including the terminology used:

The process is pretty straightforward, basically you copy the author’s code and paste it into your own account,

[OBSOLETE] FAQ: An Overview of Using Custom Code in SmartThings (SmartThings Classic, Groovy Code)

The original FAQ information in this thread refers to the original smartthings architecture, which was in place through the end of 2022 and a little beyond. Custom code was written in the groovy programming language and ran in the smartthings cloud. As of May 2023, you can no longer add new Groovy DTH‘s or smartapps to your smartthings account. So if you came here because of a link in an old forum thread, or on another site, I’m afraid the Groovy information is no longer usable. All of this was replaced by a new architecture. Cloud to cloud integrations use the smartthings API. Hub connected devices, mostly Zigbee and zwave, now use “Edge Drivers,” written in the LUA programming language. Here’s the official announcement on those: The process for using a custom Edge Driver in the new …

3. So now where do you find the code to copy? There’s a lot of great stuff in the forums, but to be honest, the search sucks. So check out the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki. That includes both code and project reports.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section

4. And finally, while you should find the project reports inspiring and interesting, and the Device Type handlers useful, here’s the reason why you may not need much if any of the custom code for smartapps anymore: webcore is essentially a scripting language for SmartThings. Very powerful, and has done most of the heavy lifting for you. Great for stacked conditionals “If This, then that–unless…”

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

Have fun!