I am a Philips Hue user and love HomeKit integration. I didn’t think it would be powerful enough for what I would like to do so I made the switch to SmartThings.
My first big disappointment is that it doesn’t appear that you can have custom scenes with different Dim settings in SmartThings.
Ex: Bedtime scene… Just put the kids to bed. Their light at 5%, the living room at 75% all around. Front Porch light turns off.
Can this be done in a scene in SmartThings?
Also, I have an Amazon Echo coming from Santa. Can you trigger scenes with the Echo? Or is it much more limited than that?
Yes, you can do that using Routines. Click the circle with the checkmark in it at the bottom of the app, then press the three dots in the upper right and select “Add Routine”
Edit: You can trigger whatever you like with Echo - just search on here there’s many people doing all kinds of integrations with it.
Oh good! Glad I was missing something. It seemed so limited. Thought I had to dim everything to X%, and turn things on and off. Seemed like very little control. I’m going to play around with it now.
I love IFTTT. Can’t wait to have everything integrated on X-Mas.
Looks like routines doesn’t do what I need. You can’t have control over individual devices. Dimming has to be set for all devices. So you can’t have one room dimmed to 5% and the rest of the rooms at 75%.
If that won’t work, you can go with Rule Machine (which is what I likely would do, but that’s just because @bravenel did excellent work with Rule Machine)
Just set up multiple Rules that have the same Trigger (your bedtime routine); one rule for each room (or at least each different light dim %)
EDIT: Actually… Rule Machine has the ability to Set Dimmers and then Set These Other Dimmers, so as long as you only need 2 different percentages, you can do it with 1 rule.
Create a new mode called “movie” or whatever you want your scene to be named. Then create a few SmartLights rules to set the lights to whatever level you want when you enable that “Mode”
Go to The starburst icon in the app, select the SmartApps tab, go to SmartThings recommends, then Click on Smart Lights. You can create a bunch of new “lighting automations” that use Mode Change as the trigger and then set the lights to various levels.
yeah believe me, what you want to do can be done, you just might need to try a few different options. Creating the Scene in the HUE app then using IFTTT to trigger that scene when a virtual switch is triggered in ST is a good thing.
What brand of lights are you using? As mentioned above, if it happens to be Hues or LIFX, you can create scenes in their native app and then execute the scene from SmartThings through the IFTTT integration. That gives you an additional set of options, although it does require using three apps to set it up.
You can accomplish what you described by using CoRE and creating a Piston that implements logic that will turn on certain lights, set their dim/brightness to a specific level, then apply various settings to different lights or sets of lights/switches on/off as you want. I would suggest creating a virtual switch via the ST IDE and run the Piston when that virtual switch is turned on. You can also then make that virtual switch available to Alexa and execute the logic via voice command, “Alexa, turn on BedTime.”
