Is there a getting started guide on this forum for a guy that wants to a do bit of tinkering that isn’t out of date and apply to the old Smartthings app?
Is there a guide to what works and what doesn’t currently?
Where to find these items, and how to use them?
Can this/these guide(s) be pinned to the top of the Wiki or How-to rather than lost in the details?
After hours of messing around, I’ve decided to swallow my pride and ask? I’ve seen a number of threads/replies by many on specifics (most notably @JDRoberts ), but there seems to be an absence of ‘the real basic I haven’t got a clue where to find thing for dumbies’ questions.
In my case, I wanted to get a Philio PAN04-1b sorted. I saw device handler developed by @erocm1231. I went into the Groovy IDE pasted his code from GitHub (the repo link isn’t offered where I live), but I still can’t use it (how do I even identify a custom device handler in the Smartthings App and use it? - one of those real basic, for dumbies questions). Then later in his thread it seems to imply it is no longer relevant as now child devices can be added? Does the groovy IDE even work with the new app? Or do I need to use Webcore now? Is Webcore even the the right tool?
SmartThings has never provided an official guide that was very detailed. Staff have said in this forum that most people have 15 or fewer devices and never use any custom code, so I guess (they didn’t say this part specifically) they thought that the app itself was enough for those folks.
As you noted, I stopped updating my beginners guide a couple of years ago because the smartthings app is no longer voice-navigable, so I’ve just gotten farther and farther out of date myself.
The most important thing to know is that the entire groovy platform Will be going away sometime this year. There’s a whole new architecture where you have to host your own smart apps and we still don’t know how or if there will be a way to do custom DTHs for hub connected devices. (All the documentation that’s been put out so far has been on cloud connected devices. Not zwave or Zigbee.)
So I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen, although maybe some of the folks in the developer or beta programs have more idea. There is a section of the forum to discuss the new architecture here:
Since the smartthings-hosted groovy cloud will be going away, that means webcore won’t work anymore either. (It’s really just a custom smart app created in groovy by a community member, albeit a very sophisticated one.) They are really trying to encourage people to use the new rules API instead. Again, you’ll find sections on that in the link I just gave. But in any case, Webcore is part of the old platform, so it doesn’t solve the issues you were asking about. And webcore is a rules engine, not a DTH generator.
As far as where that leaves you with that specific device, I don’t know, like I said I’m pretty out of date at this point.
I suggest you create a new topic under devices with that model number in the topic title and see what people can suggest for that specific project.
And hopefully someone with more information than I have will respond to your general topic here.
