New to ST and the forum. I bought the new version 3 I believe ST hub last week. I have 4 Hue lights in my house, a nest door bell, and a ST water leak sensor, and a Google Home Hub, and POE cameras inside and out, So my smart home is not very big right now, lol.
On to my first question. I played around with the new ST app and seems like a lot of people use the classic app for more in depth choices of things and if you want to use webcore. So I uninstalled new app and installed classic app. I figured out pretty simple a smart lighting scene for my porch light, dusk to dawn. Hooray for me, lol. Works out great. What I am trying to do now is my living room lamps (2), I would like to have them come on say 8.30 at night until say 2 in the morning then shut off. I tried to build a smart app with it using my phone as a presence sensor or lack of since my phone would not be at home, and if it saw my phone not home at 8.30pm then turn living room lights on, and leave them on til 2am. But Iâm not doing something right, because I have video camâs in house that I checked from work and the lights donât come on when Iâm gone. Is there something else Iâm missing? An away mode I have to trigger or setup or ???
Iâm trying to start out real simple here, so forgive me, Iâm not dumb but between reading here and some webcore posts, and videoâs, I"m a bit overwhelmed. I am excited at possibilities of simplifying some home processes but have a ton to learn before it makes sense.
Thank you for input.
Welcome! Can you post a screenshot of the rule that you set up?
I suspect the issue is just a little confusion over how geopresence works.
It allows events to be triggered when your phone crosses the boundary, either coming into your home or leaving it. Itâs not an ongoing âknows that I am not home.â
For that, you would use something called âlocation.modeâ
But first letâs see how you have set up the rule in case itâs something else.
You could certainly do that, but not with the rule you have set up.
That one works the way I explained initially: when it gets a âruss just leftâ event, then it will check to see if the time is between 8:30 pm and 2:30 am And if it is, then it will turn on the lights.
Since you are leaving at 6:00 pm, the event occurs outside your time window, so the lights donât come on.
Instead, create an automation to set the location.mode to âawayâ when you leave.
Then use the light on rule that you have, but remove the presence test, and instead test for mode equals away.
Youâll need another automation for when you come home to change the mode to something else, typically âhomeâ but thatâs up to you.
Just remember that in smartthings, âpresenceâ detection is really âarrival/leaving eventâ detection. Itâs not whether you are home now. Itâs the ability to trigger things to happen based on the moment that you arrive or leave. That is when you cross the geozone threshold in either direction.
But you can use a Geozone threshold event to change the mode, which is what most people do, so that gives the system the ongoing awareness of whether you are home or not based on what the mode is.
Didnât work unfortunately. I sit here at work and see lights didnât come on. I also notice the app mode says home, guess I thought if my phone was away from my gps setting as home, it would switch to away.
If you are already away at work, then there is no âleavingâ event to trigger the lights coming on. Itâs physically crossing the boundary that creates the leaving event, and only in the moment of that crossing.
âWhen everyone leavesâ Is only evaluated at the moment that the last person actually crosses that boundary.
Can you post a screen capture of the new rule that didnât work?
Smartthings does not automatically change the mode from home to away unless you have a rule set up to specifically change the mode.
If you are leaving the house at 6:30 PM, then that is when you would expect the mode to change from home to away, assuming that you have set up a rule to do that.
But you have also said that the lights should only come on between 8:30 PM and 2 AM.
So your trigger event, which is the mode change, is happening before your time restriction window. So the lights donât come on.
Iâm not able to use the app at this time, so someone else is going to have to help you by giving you an example of what would work.
You need to flip your thinking. Something has to make the automation run. There has to be an event happening that can be latched onto.
You want the lights to come on at a certain time, e.g. 8:30pm, so your trigger is âAt a specified timeâ ( or similar wording). You can also specify the off time when doing that.
You also need a qualifying condition to say only to do this if your mode is âawayâ.
So you had it the opposite say around, you were requesting the lights be turned on if you left the house at a certain time.
Thanks for replies guys. So I got to playing with Webcore, and created this. I setup Away Work as a daily routine, if my phone was away from home and to run automatically.
Think it will work?
As others have said, you should be using the time as the trigger to run the automation (look at the Timer code block if you want to use WebCore). So once your time-based trigger fires, you can use an if statement (or a restriction) to check if the locationMode is âawayâ and then perform the desired action.
Thanks for reply, and sorry to aggrivate you guys. Itâs pretty obvious you are all saying the same thing but, dang this is hard to wrap my head around.
Now that youâre using webCoRE, be sure to check out their forum. Great place to find example pistons and ask for assistance. The folks enjoy helping with building pistons
Can you post a screenshot of the rule that you set up?
