Mode Triggers Routine (Classic App)

SmartApps & Automations
1

Why can you not trigger a routine based on the mode in the classic app? Am I totally missing something? It seems only natural that when your house is set to Away mode you would want to turn out all the lights for instance.

thanks!

2

You can, it’s just not that easy to find.

  1. Smartthings expects you to set up your lighting automations using the official smart lighting feature, which is newer than routines. And that one can trigger on a Mode change. :sunglasses:

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205380404-Smart-Lights

  1. modes are definitely used with routines, but you set up the routine to NOT run in specific modes. So you could have a “turn off all lights” routine and then set it to not run in all of your other modes, and then it will only run when the mode was away. It’s just that that gets really confusing and hard to keep track of, which is why they changed it up for the newer official smart lights feature.

Probably when they first designed it they assumed that anyone switching the house mode to “away” was going to do so based on a presence sensor, and you can trigger routines to run based on that event, so they just hadn’t quite thought it through.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205380034-Routines-in-the-SmartThings-Classic-app

So if you want to use routines, the first question is what happens when you are all away from home? If you use presence sensors, you just use that as the routine trigger.

  1. if you have a routine that you want to have run when you’re away from home, but you are not using presence sensors, you were just going to change the mode some other way, it is possible to combine one and two above.

Have the official smart lights feature turn on a virtual switch when the mode changes. Then trigger your routine to run when that virtual switch comes on ( and turn it off again in the routine so it will be ready for the next time)

That’s a little more complicated, but it will work for some use cases.

So the ability is there, just as with many other things in the Classic SmartThings app, it’s not always easy to find.

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