I love the Google Sheets reporting of home data, and now have 9 Aeon Multisensor 6s, plus various other devices. It’s about 20 devices and over 70 individual sensors in aggregate. I am into environmental data logging, not house control.
But now I have an embarrassment of riches problem. It’s hard to know when a device or sensor has quit. Sometimes it’s days before I notice someone’s batteries died, or whatever. I would like a notification when something has stopped reporting. I don’t know if something like this exists.
Ideally here’s what it might do:
I don’t want to have to add and remove individual devices from the device (app) side, if at all possible. (Moving through all those add/create/modify script screens in the klunky Smartthings app.) I just want to add or remove devices at the hub level. Radio checkmarks in the web interface, or something. Far better yet, default to monitoring every device (not only when script first runs, but also for newly added devices). Then what needs to be done actively is removing some device(s) from monitoring, or changing the alarm time for some devices away from the default time (see next).
I have a lot of different kinds of devices, some with short reporting periods, some very long. The script should be able to be told what is a reasonable length of time for each, before sounding an alarm. Better yet, make your own categories, then assign devices to these categories. (This would let you change settings for all of a given type of device easily. Or have “Long period devices” and “Short period”, etc.)
It should be reporting at the device level, not the sensor level. With something like the Aeon Multisensor 6, it’s almost always something catastrophic (batteries dead), not an individual sensor. Also, for multisensors, some often report much more often than others, or might even be set to a fixed 5 minute report period, or whatever. So the script should monitor the device as a whole. It can monitoring individual sensors in devices also if it wants, for extra points. But that shouldn’t be the only thing it can do.
It should send tailored notification(s) for failures. (“AMS6 in attic has not reported in 30 minutes.”) You should be able to choose what the message is, whether sms or email, notification with verbal alert, hopefully optional phone TTS of the notification text, etc.
I would really like to know if the hub is down, too. (In which case, also be smart enough not to alarm for every device on the hub.) I would love to log the hub being up or down somehow. It’s a great proxy for so many other things whose performance you want to be aware of over time (how often your internet and power and hub are up or down in a given year, etc.).
It would be great to have a Google Sheets log of all the above.
I would think that this script should sit at the Smartthings server level. Not dependent on my hub or my phone.
Okay, well, I’ve said a ton. Maybe it’s all pie in the sky. Does anyone know of something with functionality like this? Thanks so much if you can help!
Several members have created wellness check smart apps for their own use made them available to the community. Different ones have different features. I don’t think any of them has all of the features you’re asking for, in particular there’s not much point in having the smart app give a hub notification since the hub already gives its own notification. But you can look at them and see what’s there that you might want to use. “Simple device Viewer” is probably the most popular right now and has the advantage that it just check the logs rather than individual devices so it doesn’t put any additional strain on the network or run down the batteries on the devices faster.
There are also separately. People who have set up various ways of logging activity.
The fastest way to find both of these is by using the quick browse lists in the community created wiki. These will put you back into the forum for author threads for various projects and code.
There are three sections for the quick browse list: smart apps, device type handlers, and project report.
Look under “wellness check” in the smart apps for those, and under “logging” in both smart apps for the other ones.
You should already receive a phone notification from your cloud account whenever the hub itself is not reachable. You will receive a second notification when the hub is reachable again.
Thanks JD, I was not aware of the wiki for quick browse lists. It sounds like a great idea, with so much going on.
I know about hub status as a simple notification. I need it integrated with device status (so I don’t get 20 devices telling me they’re down, when actually it’s the hub down). Plus I could really use logging of all that. If you meant hub status is already integrated with wellness scripts, apologies.
Let me check out the wellness apps, as you said. I wonder if any are as comprehensive as I am looking for.
Ultimately maybe I should see if I can hire someone to write or modify Smartapps for me. Like upwork/elance, for folks familiar with Smartthings. As I see it, there’s a lot of Smartthings code that is very cool in its way, but only halfway to what I need. For this topic, and a number of other ones. It seems I’m pushing current boundaries.
If you know a good place to find freelance Smartthings coders, that’d be great. Is it appropriate to ask somewhere in this Community?
Sure, there have been some people who paid for projects in the past. Just post a note in the developers section of the forum and make sure you put clearly that you are willing to pay rather than just hoping someone will develop it for free.
You might also look into HAM bridge and see if it has any of the features that you want. It runs on a mini Mac and you can add all kinds of scripts to it so it gives you a lot of features you might not get from the base smartthings implementation. I think it would certainly be easy to do the logging.
Thanks very much for the tips, JD! I am asking someone now in a Message, if they can develop something.
The HAM bridge sounds interesting but unfortunately I’m not an Apple person and don’t want to start yet another project. Smartthings comes so close to being what I want in so many ways, but isn’t actually there for most of them without a lot more work on my part (like the HAM bridge or the wellness app or Google Sheets logging or … the list goes on).
That said, it’s still FAR better than nothing. Very cool and powerful in its way. That much is very clear.
