Smart Home Monitor - Feature Requests

[JDRoberts]

As you mentioned, it’s unlikely that SmartThings will build anything into smart home monitor that only works with one type of phone (except, of course, for Samsung’s own models).

That said, you could definitely set up something in SmartThings that would do exactly what you’re describing as far as all the phones being plugged in–if they are android phones. See the NFC link that I included in my previous post.

Instead of responding to an individual phone, you would have each phone turn on a virtual switch to indicate that it was in charge mode, and then you could have a core piston which checks to see that all of the switches had entered charge mode. You would probably need some help from the peer experts in core to get it all set up, but it definitely could be done. This is one of the strengths of SmartThings. While the official features are often surprising limited, the platform as a whole is extremely versatile and the community can help with ways to accomplish specific use cases.

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

As far as the hub itself acting as an alarm clock, I don’t see that as being practical for most people. First, of course, many households have two, three, or even more people – – you wouldn’t generally want a single alarm to wake everyone in the house at the same time.

Secondly, it is the nature of mesh networking that the best place to locate the hub is centrally in the home both horizontally and vertically. That is hardly ever A sleeping space.

Instead, again the strength of SmartThings is that you can add hundreds of different devices to your network, and several of these do indeed work very well as alarm sounds. You can use custom mpgs on a simple Android device, you can use one of several connected alarm clocks, you could use the Aeon"doorbell" which can play up to 99 custom sounds. You could use a DNLA device. And in each case you would choose the device which meets your particular requirements and your own budget. There are many people who use spoken notifications with SmartThings, either for emergencies or common notifications like “the laundry is done.” But it does usually mean adding an additional device.

So you can do both of those specific things now if you want. They aren’t part of the built-in features, but in these particular cases, I don’t think they need to be.