SmartThings Community

Lighting/Dimmer Automation?

(Matthew Callender) #1

Hello Everyone,
So I’m very new to home automation but I’ve had my ST system up and running for a few weeks now and I am wanting to tweak it into perfection :wink:

I’ve tried a few different things but so far most things don’t quite work how I’d like or as expected so I was hoping the community could point me in the right direction.

Firstly I’d like to make all of my lights voice controllable with my Pixel XL phone with Google Assistant. Apparently ST and Google Home work together but not Google Assistant on a phone but luckily it looks like IFTTT has pretty good integration with ST/Assistant. I intend to have a voice command for each room for on, off and every 10% of dimmer level. Obviously programming 12 voice actions in IFTTT per room will be tedious but it seems to be the best solution unless someone else has a better idea.

Secondly, I’d like to set the dimmer level of all my lights to correspond with sunrise/sunset. 100% @ Sunrise, 30% @ sunset, etc. I set up a routine to do this but it turns all of my lights on and they stay on so if this runs while I am out of town or something all my lights stay on indefinitely. I tried calling a second routine, “Turn everything off”, with the first routine by tying it to a simulated switch but it seems you cannot trigger a routine from within a routine. My goal was to trigger the routine “Sunset”, turn on and set level for all lights and switch off sim switch “Master off” to trigger routine “Turn everything off”.

There are a few other things i’d like to do but so far these two have been much more difficult that they should be in my opinion. I feel like I may just be over complicating something that should be simple.

Thanks in advance for any tips you may have

Matt

(Matthew Callender) #2

As an added piece of into about the IFTTT/ST integration I am using sim switches to execute the routines because of IFTTT limitations to not run routines directly.

#3

The short answer is just use core, It can do everything you want and then some. :sunglasses:

Separately, I did just want to say that yes, you can have a routine trigger a routine – – you do it by having the routine turn on a virtual switch, and the virtual switch runs the routine.

I mention this, because it’s very commonly used with voice control and specifically with the IFTTT channel. Flip a switch and a routine runs. Or you may find some use cases where that’s the quickest simplest way to do it.

(Matthew Callender) #4

Thanks for the reply but I have have poor luck with CoRE. I tried it a few weeks ago and setup 10 or so pistons only to have them mysteriously disappear moments later never to be seen again. Tried rebuilding/recovering from within the app with no luck. Started over and got 2 more set up only to lose those also. Gave up on that pretty quick.

Also I am not using Google Home or Echo so that doesn’t apply. Unfortunately the Google Home integration doesn’t translate over to Google Assistant on Pixel phones.

#5

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. It’s not about using Google home or echo – – it’s about learning how to use virtual switches to trigger routines. The instructions for that are in the link I gave you because the most common usage is probably for voice control. But it’s the same method anyway.

#6

Also you mentioned lights staying on while you are not home. You might consider using modes to keep certain routines from running when you aren’t home. Your phone can serve as a presence device, you can have the house mode change to “Away” when you leave and “Home” when you return. Then tell your routine to run only when the house is in “Home” mode.

Here is a link to using mobile phone for presence.

(Andrea Bianco) #7

You may want to look at Google Home Helper by Michael Struck.