Rules for Home System

I have my idea for my home system. I just need information as how to make this happen. I think I need to use CoRE, but I’m not sure. I have an Arlo camera and several iris motion/contact sensors.

3 Modes
Home-different sensors cause different notifications i.e. back door causes alarm, front door causes a chime, outside camera sends a phone notification
Outside-to disable outside motion detectors
Away/Night-inside motion sensors, doors opening, and window sensors all cause alarms

A few rules
Both presence sensors gone-switch to away
One or more presence sensors at home-switch to home mode

Wishlist
A chime for when the front door opens/closes
Different sensors give different notifications when at "home"
i.e. motion sensor outside gives a phone notification, garage sensor has the siren go off, and front door gives a chime if opened

That last part of the Wishlist is what I desire most. Any ideas are appreciated!

webCoRE can accomplish all of that (as can the other rules engines available). However, webCoRE is the most robust (imho).

With that said, you might want to use a more hybrid approach. So, for changing modes based on presence, I would recommend Routine Director (Add a Smartapp > Presence & Modes > Routine Director) and/or Working From Home. I use both to track all of our arrival sensors and phones. Then, I have routines set up with no triggers that get fired when someone leaves or arrives.

As for different sensors giving different notifications based upon mode, I would use a combination of Smart Lighting (Add a Smartapp > Safety & Security) and Notify Me When.

For chimes and such (if you have z-wave/zigbee sirens and chimes), you can setup those rules in Notify Me When to trigger based upon door open/close, etc.

Personally, I try to do as much as I can within the ST app (smartapps and routines) and leave the more complex things to webCoRE and Stringify.

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All of that can be done natively with SmartLighting and/or Smart Home Monitor. The Chime would all depend on what you have as a speaker/ siren or if using an always on phone/tablet with LANNouncer/BigTalker , or WiFi Speakers.

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RLDreams,
Thank you for your response. I haven’t looked at the Smart Lighting app yet. With the Smart Home Monitor, I found that for Armed(Home) I could not choose sensors to deliver a specific notification i.e. all of them had to deliver the same notification. For Armed(Home) I want a back door sensor to cause an alarm, and an outside sensor to give a phone notification. Any thoughts?

Thank you,
Aaron

Core_Phx,
Thank you for your help. Routine Director looks like it would solve the presence issue. Smart Lighting also looks like it will help with getting certain things to give certain notifications.
Can you explain the routine that doesn’t have triggers but turns on when someone leaves or arrives?
Thank you,

Aaron

You can add more modes in the IDE, beyond just the initial 3. SmartLighting is the main ST control , not sure how you could be playing around or designing anything, experimenting with C.O.R.E if you have not even set up SmartLighting yet to see what is possible natively, before dealing with 3rd party apps

I don’t know if SmartLighting has been fixed completely but most of my ST issues came from using SmartLighting and/or Native Apps.

I would highly recommend learning and using webCoRE for rules. I still like using Routines for “Button” type events…YMMV

Sure. I use Routine Director to run routines when someone arrives or leaves. The routines themselves are trigger-less (meaning, they can’t be run by anything other than Routine Director). So, I have it set so that if everyone is away and it’s Night, then autolock all doors, turn off all but a handful of lights and set the A/C a bit higher. I also have it turn on the bedroom TV (for the dog; He gets lonely lol).

You could accomplish this with other methods, of course, but I find that Routine Director works best for me without having to have different routines with odd names. I.E. “Night - No One Home”, “Day - No One Home”, etc. It’s all in one place and I only need 4 routines to accomplish it.

What were your SmartLighting issues? I haven’t had any [knock on wood].

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Misfires…Misfires…Misfires! Also, stuff like turning a light on at a certain percentage with motion then manually adjusting then motion makes it go back to the previous state. Very frustrating.

Scheduled stuff not working. Ghost triggers.

Ahhhh… yeah… I’ve encountered all those (and still do from time to time). That’s why I leave simple stuff to SmartLighting (turning on a light on motion and then turning it off again after in low traffic areas) and the heavy-lifting, high traffic stuff to webCoRE and Stringify.

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