I recently voiced frustration in a thread about the Groovy deprecation in that why should I have to start using other tools like SharpTools. My comments were due to the frustration with the SmartThings app Scene/Routine limit and the impending Groovy deprecation that could leave many of us with a loss of functionality… My beef is with Samsung/SmartThings, not SharpTools.
I decided to give SharpTools a trial. Initially I was most interested in their Rules Engine. That’s where I started. I began to ‘convert’ my Smart App rules/routines I can no longer do in the ST app because of the 200 Scene/Routine limit. I then started to work on moving my webCoRe pistons over. Just like when I started using WC there’s a learning curve. But Josh and the community are very responsive and I’ve gotten the help I’ve needed very quickly.
Sure, there are still a few things I did in webCoRe that I don’t think SharpTools can quite handle yet but I’m working through them and sometimes it just takes stepping back and rethinking the logic. But dang this thing is slick. I subscribed just a few days in to my trial.
I did not really have any intention of using the SharpTools dashboards. I had given up on dashboards in other apps due to the difficulty in making changes and lack of flexibility in customizing. But, I decided to give the SharpTools dashboards a test drive and I’m sold. The SharpTools team have put together a very polished and flexible system. In just a few days I have been able to create an entire suite of dashboards for my house way beyond what I thought was possible. And you should check out some of what the community have produced.
Really nice work @joshua_lyon. I’m glad to be part of the SharpTools Community.
SharpTools is great. Been using it for years with its Tasker Plugins. I’ve been converting Tasker routines and SmartThings rules over to SharpTools. Josh and team are quick to add requested updates. They just release an update to let you run rules between a couple of dates, for example. I’ve been bugging Josh quite a bit in the SharpTools community, but he’s always willing help. If more people convert and make good suggestions it may we’ll surpass WebCore someday.
I agree with everything in the OP. Really glad there is a viable alternative to webCoRE. I migrated over last weekend and the experience has been nothing but positive.
Right now, webcore is being shut down on October 15th. It s always possible for developers to step forward and take on the huge task to convert it to work with the new Rules API but the end result would be a totally different app than what it is now.
No one has stepped forward since Edge was mentioned and so don’t expect any miracles.
To add to my praise, I am continuing to work through some of my more complex rules that I have in webCoRE and @joshua_lyon has been able to help me with everything so far. I just had another success with setting-up random color changes for a holiday rule. Josh reached-out after hours to help me with this. Not expected but very much appreciated.
Hi Dan-
Thanks for commenting. What’s the functional concern here? SharpTools is a ‘cloud’ solution for dashboards and the Rule Engine.
If the concern is downtime, I understand it’s one of those things that’s hard to quantify, but you can take a look through our community and see that there’s been very minimal downtime over the years. We run on Google Cloud (with a highly resilient backend), so those very exceptional cases where GMail has been down is probably one of those times we’ve been impacted.
If it’s performance, check out some of the comments from people who have recently moved to SharpTools:
I use Sharptools for almost everything, it seems faster.
I don’t understand how or why, but I have a simple setup of a light that turns on when another one turns on.
Logic would dictate local, on hub execution would be fastest… But it’s painfully slow. Sharptools does it quicker.
I recently migrated to SharpTools from webCoRE and I’ve already noticed that routines run faster and devices respond quicker.
Credit where credit is due, the new SmartThings APIs are really well designed!
Let me add that I’ve moved over some presence checking rules from Tasker/SmartThings to SharpTools to test how they work and within a split second of my hitting the geofence SharpTools sends me a Pushover notice that I’m home. This is going from Tasker to SharpTools and back to my Pixel 6, so cloud all the way, and it is still pretty fast. I’m sure there’s some lag because it has to take time to get all the way around but it really isn’t all that noticeable.
Also, I set up lights on/off time-based rules in SharpTools to turn lights on/off at specific times and while they might not be as fast as a locally running SmartThings rule, they are still extremely fast. When SharpTools hits the time, my lights are on/off a split second later. Of course, if my internet goes down, these won’t work well, but luckily that’s rare. And SmartThings continues to use a lot of cloud-based connections. Not everything runs locally on the Hub.
So we currently take a lot of data from SmartThings, send it in to InfluxDB and graph it with Grafana. I haven’t dug into Sharp Tools yet, is it simply a rules engine or can it export data on an interval basis? Sounds like this will come to a halt as the Groovy InfluxDB app we use is quite old.
I’ve now been able to convert all but five of my webCoRE pistons to SharpTools. Four of the remaining are due the fact some parameters are not currently exposed (but likely will be when the devices move to drivers - I’m not willing to exclude and re-add them right now) and one I just need to refactor the logic on.
