It would be great to have a small LED that indicates whether or not your home is armed (or if my exististing contact sensors or light switches could be programmed to do this).
I’m thinking a $15-$20 small battery-powered device (the size of a contact sensor or smaller) that receives a signal from your hub and will color an LED different colors based on the current SHM status or home mode. I would place them near my main exterior doors so that I wouldn’t need to check my phone to figure out if I will set off an alarm.
An audible cue wouldn’t be bad either, but a constant visual would be helpful. Currently I have a light trigger when I run my routine to take the dog out, but if that light is already on, then I’m just hoping my routine ran correctly. I don’t really want to purchase Hues or Sonos just for this purpose.
I’m probably attributing that to normal SmartThings issues and not necessarily your device type or smartapp. In the last 24-36 hours there seems to have been multiple hub issues they are dealing with… some of my smart lighting hasn’t triggered (sunrise/sunset specifically).
But, did your keypad indicate that the status had changed and it hadn’t?
The fun continues! Hopefully smartthings will start making updates without breaking the basic functionality. That way, our wives won’t give us a hard time about all the money and time spent on these things
Any other ideas? I have this same issue, I’m new to the ST community. It’s not a problem for me, I can just look at the phone, but the kids are constantly setting off the alarm.
Any light on a smart switch or smart light will work. Light on = armed, armed stay. Light off disarm. I am using a color smart bulb for this. Color bulb is ideal because of color and dimmable.
I was actually just researching if there was an audible tone generator that can be activated once motion was detected.
Say I walk thru my kitchen in the morning to let my dogs out, an audible tone is made determining if the home is still armed, instead of the notifications/alerts being sent to my wife (let alone if I have SHM integrated with a monitored security company).
I know this thread seems to be mostly inactive, but on the off chance that anyone has some great ideas, I’ m going to drop this note here.
I’m thinking that a battery operated light may not be optimal, unless combined with motion detection. I would be worried that the continuous power to the LED would drain the battery for no reason. In this case if the motion detector would turn on the current status notification light, it might be more efficient.
Maybe rules-based interaction with a dedicated Cree bulb would be better? It’s the right price, but I could wish for a less obtrusive form factor.
I ended up going with the Centralite Keypads and they have worked pretty well for displaying basic armed vs. disarmed status of SHM. You just wave your hand over the keypad and it will display armed, partially armed or unarmed as well as a green or red LED to most simply let you know if you are either armed/partially-armed or unarmed. I bought the newer Lowes ones and use a keypad app to align it with status & program codes. They’ve worked pretty well and I even have one outside (in a protective box).
Additional benefit: these keypads (with the correct smartapp) will allow you to use a delay before taking an action. This will allow you to include an exit delay if desired.
I requested smart things use the existing light in the fortezz alarm to warn if it is armed or not. They told me it is not possible…
Currently i am using an outlet switch with a red nightlight plugged into it, but that only tells me if the routine has run. The last couple days the routine has been running but the alarm is still armed so needless to say it is a bit disruptive.
love to find a good cheap alternative. I tried a amazon fire on sale for $35 in December, planed to mount it to the wall, but just don’t seem to use it like i intended.
There are a couple of options here. I apparently got locked into my own thinking, and didn’t consider the off-the-shelf solution that you came up with. Forrest, trees, etc.
Anyhow, I finished my build on the hardware, showing that a Zigbee chip from a donor Cree bulb can be run off of batteries and used to control a LED indicator.
I’m using Rule Machine to drive the connection with SHM (God knows that this hasn’t been easy with how flakey SHM has been lately, but it seems to be calming down). I ran into a problem with my rules but that was due to my inexperience with Github, and not having the latest version.
With the latest version of bravenel’s masterpiece, you can directly link the status of SHM to drive the on/off of the indicator light. It takes a little work to figure out how the rule should be set up, but the documentation that has been put together around Rule Machine makes this doable.
