Since I bought my hub a few months ago, I’ve been very limited on what I’ve done with it. I haven,t asked because I felt dumb. This is pretty basic. I figured if I played with it enough I’d figure it out. I haven’t and I just want to know!
I have both classic and new app installed. My issue is that y’all talk about adding smart apps from the marketplace, but I have very few listed in there. I went to the sticky here that gives a list of “lights and switches” smart apps and there is a TON of them compared to the 5 that show up in my marketplace under “lights and switches” same with climate control. I searched “adding apps from marketplace” and it just says they should show up. WTF am I doing wrong here? Help a newbie out!
For starters, Accept that Samsungs documentation on Smartthings is beyond horrible. And that the majority of functions are third party…
Having said that, what is it you are trying to do? Once you know what you want to do, start looking, start asking. I’m no expert, but I can help somewhat.
OK, since you are using the V2 classic app, I suggest you read the following two community FAQs. They should answer your initial questions. ( in each case, the topic title is a clickable link)
Before that, though, the shortest answer is that you can set up automations for almost everything using the official “smart Lights” feature in either app ( also called “smart lighting“: they’re the same thing) , and using “custom automations” in the new V3 app or “routines” in the V2 classic app. You don’t need a separate smart app for each individual device. All those different lights and switches can have rules set up for them using the smart lights feature. So see if these help.
I will read through those for sure. I’ve made my own rules/automations for some things. To be more specific, I wanted to install “vacation lighting director” but it is not visible. Should it be? There were some others that were suggested for other things, but are not in my list.
We actually don’t usually recommend that new folks start with the wiki with the exception of one single page: The quick browse lists. I know you and I have discussed that page before, but there still seems to be some confusion about it.
Once you get to that page, you don’t have to do any more searching and you don’t have to type anything in. You just skim the page yourself until you find a listing that looks like it would be relevant, and then you click on the little number at the end of that listing and that will take you to links to relevant threads in the forum.
The quick browse lists just exist to make it easier to search this forum. Because the search here sucks.
There is one list on the quick browse lists page that might be useful for new folks. If you look down at the bottom of that page for the “project reports“ section, the very first list is the “get started“ list.
Interesting. So you say that “vacation lighting director” (number 10 on the list in the sticky at the top) requires custom code and the process of adding it to the account, but “smart lights”, “gentle wake up” and 3 others dont?
Smart lights is an official feature and definitely doesn’t. I’m not sure about the others, but they are probably pre-populated for you.
Back in 2015, smartthings the company relied on individual community developers to create custom code and then submit it for “publication.“ But that was before the official smart lighting feature and the official smart home monitor feature had been developed.
Smartapps which had been officially published would be pre-populated depending on your region.
By 2017, however, They had moved away from that process and really didn’t publish much of anything from the community anymore… And they deprecated a lot of the stuff which had previously pre-populated.
Vacation lighting director was one of the ones which was officially “retired” from the marketplace.
Well that answers it then. I really just thought I was missing something. Reading through the forums and people say “install blah blah blah” smart app from the marketplace. Then I’d go there and it wasn’t there. I guess its not supposed to be.
I’ll read through and figure out how to add it. I hadn’t bothered to before because it seemed like these things should just be available.
Thank you for finally clearing that up for me. I thought I was going crazy.
We often say smartthings is very powerful, but not very discoverable.
As far as vacation light director, one of the reasons it was retired was because it really didn’t meet people’s requirements, it would turn on lights at three in the morning, turn on lights for two minutes and then turn them off again, etc. It’s just random as to what it does, and most people expect more intelligence than that.
If you check with the folks in the webcore forum, I would bet somebody there has already written a piston that handles this use case better.
Also, when you are looking through the forum, if there is a smartapp suggestion see if the date is 2018 or newer. That way it will likely fit the new paradigm.
