Purchasing SmartThings next month and have questions

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1

So as the title says next month I’ll be purchasing SmartThings hub, 3 door sensors, and two presence sensors. I’m looking to automate my house as best I can. What I would like to accomplish with the purchase of these SmartThings devices are:

  1. Use Sonos and SmartThings to welcome me home after work, and good bye when I leave.
  2. Announce that said door is currently opened, or has been left open.
    3 Tie into my Phillip Hue lights and turn on every light when we arrive home at night, and turn off all lights once we leave for the day.

Are all these things possible? and if so how hard are they to setup?

Thanks

2

Sonos text to speech is currently not working 100% unfortunately. I miss my good morning greeting and weather forecast

3

But these are things that can be accomplished with SmartThings?

4

all 3 items are possible. there are many solutions to accomplish what you want, some require more work than others. the great thing about ST is the community creativity and help.

item 1: setting up event trigger (coming home, leaving home) is very easy. setting the sonos to play a phrase as a string; requires a bit work. search the forum on how to use the TextToSpeech or Play coding command.
item 2: same as item 1, but the event trigger is a different item (when door contact is open) play phrase on sonos.
item 3: this is probably the easiest. event trigger could be when gate or garage open, gps is coming within x distance of home, have ST turn on lights.

alternatively, if you don’t want to set automated event triggers, you can use the app, to trigger each event profile on-demand. I’m leaving home, I will press the leaving home event button in the mobile app, then ST will turn lights off.

having the sonos speak a phrase is the item will require work as it was designed for music not to play custom phrases. people have gone around this by making the phrase into an mp3 and telling sonos to play the mp3, using custom apps, etc. search the forum and I’m sure you’ll find a solution that you can adapt to your situation.

5

I’ve used this to have Morgan Freeman tell me goodnight when I tell alexa to hit my night time virtual switch. its been fairly reliable.

A note on request 1, I think goodbye may be difficult since you’ll presumably be out of hearing range of your speaker by the time your presence sensor notices you’ve left :slight_smile: . You’ll have to wait until SmartThings moves on from automated reactions and more into google like anticipation automation…

6

As others have said all, the things you mentioned are possible and there are many different ways to do them. Regarding the goodbye, for example, the question is, how will smart things know that you are leaving? And where will you be when you want to hear the goodbye?

For example, I have a hat that I usually wear when I go out. I put a motion sensor under that hat, and when that motion sensor goes off, it triggers a number of goodbye events that happen while I’m still in the house. That’s exactly what I want. :sunglasses:

Then I have a second method where smartthings can detect that I have gone out of range of the house, and then other things can happen but I would be too far away from the house to hear voice announcements for that second group of events.

So you always have to think about what will the trigger be and what will make that trigger unique from any other circumstance. How will the house know that you are leaving in time for it to say goodbye while you can hear it? What would distinguish a goodbye from condition from just say opening the door to get a package?

Smartthings allows you to mix together different kinds of schedules. You might schedule something based on The time of day. Or on a particular sensor. Or on your phone going in or out of range. Or on you intentionally flipping a switch.

It just comes down to your deciding how you want to trigger a particular event. And understanding that smartthings is not a person, it’s not even a dog, it doesn’t have a way of figuring things out, or guessing what’s most likely. It can only respond to A specific trigger.

So what makes a goodbye event different from anything else? For me, it was picking up that particular hat. For somebody else, it might be A drawer opening where you keep your car keys, or The garage door opening during a specific time range, or your phone going out of range of the house.

For most people, the phone going out of range is the most automatic and intuitive trigger, but then you can’t hear the system say goodbye because you’re already pulling out of the driveway. So these are just the kind of things you have to work up for yourself depending on what you want to accomplish.

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7

The Sonos connection has been working like crap for the last month, my family use to use the weather forecast and morning greeting to know when to leave for school, and just makes them angry when it is doesn’t happen or is early or late.

Disappointed in the Sonos integration currently.

Morgan

8

Ditto. It stopped working one of the last 2 days in July and hasn’t been up reliably since. I had very nice thank you messages set to play for the person coming to feed my fish while on vacation (changed them every time) and the last message didn’t play.

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9

Sorry for your troubles but love the use case.

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10

:smile:

I do also miss my good morning greeting and weather forecast that I used to get every morning. It was so cheerful.