Renaming device status values

Devices & Integrations
1

Hi SmartThings people.

I’m trying to find out if it is possible to change the values that an on/off sensor reports.

To be more specific, I’m using an Aeotec Water Sensor 7 as an on/off sensor (I’ve simply connected the two pins of the water sensor to an open/closed relay switch so that I can detect when my pellet boiler switches on/off).
As a sensor it works great. I’ve renamed it so it isn’t called a “Water sensor” and I’ve disabled the notifications so that it doesn’t constantly tell me I’m having a flood.
However, I’m still left with a sensor which tells me my pellet boiler is either “Wet” or “Dry” rather than simply “On” or “Off”.
Is there any way of making SmartThings report this as “On” and “Off”?
Something as simple as renaming Wet to On, and Dry to Off would work.
Or can I tell SmartThings that it’s a more basic type of sensor by changing the type?

One of my alternative strategies was to use a different sensor such as the Aeotec Door/Window sensor 7 Pro, which has a dry contact I can connect to. However I suspect that this is likely to suffer from the same problem, except that I’ll be dealing with “Open/Closed” rather than “Wet/Dry”.

Thoughts would be appreciated.

2

A multi sensor (with a leak sensor component) is hard coded to report “wet” and “dry” states.

You could create your own driver that internally remaps those sensor inputs to a switch state output or…

Go the easier route:

  1. Create a virtual switch (either using one of the community virtual switch drivers or from Menu>Labs>Virtual Switch).
  2. Create routines that when your multi sensor is wet, turn the virtual switch on, and when dry, turn it off.
  3. Name and view your virtual switch as the actual state of the boiler.
3

I hadn’t thought of the virtual switch route. It even has the advantage of enabling me to “even out” the rapid on-off nature of the pellet boiler feed signal using a time-delayed switch-off rule. (the boiler feeds for about 4 seconds, then stops for 2 seconds. This repeats for 20 minutes or so while the boiler is active).
Many thanks for the suggestion

1 Like