I’ve been searching for a solution and cant find what I need so I’m considering to write my own. I thought it would make sense to drop in here before I begin. And by “begin” I mean from complete scratch because I have no idea where to even start.
First my purpose: I want to keep the cats out of my garden.
My hypothesis: Install a motion detector to trigger my in-ground sprinklers to run the desired zone for ten seconds and then stop.
Alexa skill controlls the Hydrawise just fine but I can’t trigger the skill externally, only through voice commands. I can tell Alexa “run zone 2 for ten seconds” and it does just that.
The Zooz outdoor motion sensor works fine and will trigger Alexa to do something (like say “hey cat get out of my garden”) but will not trigger the Alexa Hydrawise skill.
Smartthings will control the Nutone dry realy just fine. I can connect this to a custom sensor input on the Hydrawise controller and trigger a zone. This ALMOST completes the circuit but not quite. The problem is that once triggered the zone runs its programmed schedule of tewnty minutes or so. There is no way that I can figure out to make it run while the relay is closed and stop when it opens again. I can do this by daisy chaining it to a second custom sensor input so that closed commands it to run and open commands it to stop. This effectively disables the scheduled run time because the zone is in a perpetual stop command until motion is detected. In this scenario I can in fact detect motion, run for a few seconds and then stop however that zone will never run on schedule. I should add at this time that Hydrawise support has proven to be useless.
What I think is the missing link is a Smartthings device handler that will tell Hydrawise to start and stop. I can’t find such a thing so I’m considering to try and write my own. Any thoughts?
You can use echo as a “man in the middle“ for this, but you will need two echo devices.
Just have your motion sensor trigger an Amazon routine (not a SmartThings routine) That has the first echo say whatever you want to command to be to the other echo.
If you want to make the logic more complicated, you can do that by using a virtual sensor instead of the real sensor and then having the virtual sensor only triggered during certain times of day, etc.
You do all this by putting the logic restrictions on the SmartThings side so all the echo routine sees is a sensor coming on.
See the community FAQ (the topic title is a clickable link)
Thanks for the replies guys. I think the text to speach option is looking like the simplest setup but it kind of irks me to have to do that. Its seems silly to convert a binary command to speach only to have alexa perform speach recognition and convert it back to binary. I’d like to find a way to avoid that.
I also like the pest deterents that jkp posted and thats exactly what im trying to mimick with my in-ground sprinklers. I’m sure those devices would actually work better but the fun is getting my system to behave the way i want it too.
I have HydraWise, and have always wanted some way of interacting with it from SmartThings, but just wasn’t about to delve into it myself. It’s great to have the Alexa Skill for this now.
So, thank you!
I realize now that the skill can’t do things without voice interaction. So, this doesn’t really give me quite what I was thinking, but oh well. It at least opens things up to the possibility if I’m willing to do what you’ve done.
