Hey everyone. Trying to figure out how to resolve a small annoyance with ST and our new front door lock. At 11pm we have the “Goodnight” activity set to lock the front door. It works perfectly fine. However, my son lives at home (senior in college) and comes and goes at odd hours. While we could set up his phone as a third mobile presence it also highlighted the reality that sometimes I’ll be up late and I’ll run to the local store for a snack or such and forget to lock the door on return. Bottom line is that we’d like the door to do its best to stay locked during the night.
So, I’m confused why it’s not simple to have logic that says:
If “Door Unlocked” between “11pm and 7am” then Delay 2 minutes then lock door.
Both my wife and I were shocked to find that even IFTTT doesn’t support timers and delay logic. What might I be overlooking?
WebCoRE, would be able to do this easily. If you not familiar with WebCoRE, the folks in that community will be able to get you setup with your Piston(automation). It might seem overwhelming, but definitely worth looking into for this and future automations.
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What model lock? Many locks have an autolock feature built-in, includings Schlage, August, and Yale. But those will then auto lock all the time, not just during a particular time.
Otherwise, if you are using the popular lock manager smartapp or @rboy’s smartapp for locks, I believe both have timed lock options. You might find those easier to set up and use then essentially starting from scratch with webcore, although certainly webcore can do it as well.
Have you used custom code before? Most people who get SmartThings only use IFTTT after that for integration with other systems. Any typical rules logic will probably have more features if you stay within the SmartThings platform.
If you haven’t used custom code before, the following FAQ describes the process, but it’s pretty straightforward. Basically you are going to copy the author’s code and paste it into your own account.
As for where to find the code that you will copy, usually the fastest way is to look in the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki. In this case you would look in the smart app section on the list for locks.
Or, of course, if you prefer, you can go straight to webcore. But I would take a look at the existing specialty smart apps for Locks first just to see if they have other features that you might like as well.
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RBoy
(www.rboyapps.com - Making SmartThings Easy!)
6
As @JDRoberts pointed out the Lock User Code Management SmartApp has options for auto relocking and delayed relocking. If you need any additional features feel free to send in a feature request:
Somehow I missed all this. I have a Kwikset 916. It had an autolock after 30 seconds, but that was useless. Turned that feature off on Day 2 of use when we had someone visit and, of course it took more than 30 seconds to say hello so the deadbolt locked while the door was open.
For starters I went with ST’s Lock applet (it works) and also paid for RBoy apps and signed up for WebCore (and got it installed). I then also started using Stringify which also seems to handle the heavy lifting nicely. As such I’ll get a chance to try them all. WebCore looks VERY serious and as on old BASIC coder, I should have no issue with it. IFTTT we nixed simple because of some basic limitations it seemed to have, like the lack of a timer.
I’ll be digging onto your tool shortly. The only feature I can think of that’s essentially “advanced” would be what I’m doing with Stringify. The logic essentially goes:
IF Door = Unlocked THEN
IF 11pm-7am Set TIMER to 2 minutes THEN Lock Door.
IF 7am-11pm Set TIMER to 30 minutes THEN Lock Door
This works well for variable needs. If my son comes in late at night the door locks fairly quickly. If it’s daytime then lock the door a bit more slowly as it’s likely we’re outside doing this around the house.
Of course we also have scripts set up for Geo to lock everything if no one is home, etc. Trying to make do with default ST location monitoring, but it’s been very hit and miss. The idea of having to run several apps on the phone to get that working is not optimal by any means.
