The short answer is just use core, It can do everything you want and then some.
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.
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.
On October 1, 2016, Amazon added the ability to turn on a " routine" from Alexa. If you want to use that method, see the official support article.
https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/210204906-Amazon-Alexa-SmartThings-Routines
Note that the official method will not allow you to use echo to run any routine that includes a lock or a Smart Home Monitor armed state change or another device class that Alexa does not know. The method described below in this FAQ will, but it does require that you create a virtual switch.
Although at present echo can only request that smartthings turn devices on, off or dim, by using a virtual switch, you can tell echo to turn that switch on or off, and then have all kinds of things happen in smartthings. For example, if you want to have echo tu…
