Smart Home Monitor - Feature Requests

Doesn’t that depend how you trigger the routines? When all the lights are off and there’s no movement, good night. When someone starts moving in the kitchen or living room, good morning. Neither of those conditions has to happen at a consistent time.

I use them all the time and I don’t have a consistent schedule at all. How I use them is with Alexa though. I run voice macros to control the routines.

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I have a very irregular schedule, I might go to sleep at seven in the evening, I might go to sleep at two in the morning.

I turn on “asleep” mode either just with a touchless switch on the nightstand or by voice with Alexa.

Some people use a pressure mat under the mattress to indicate when the bed is occupied or not.

There are people who use Tasker and trigger events when the phone is put on the charger.

some people who watch television every night before going to sleep trigger their good night routine when the television powers off after a certain time of day.

So there are many different ways to do it, just depending on the habits of your own household. :sunglasses:

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The problem is that I may be sitting for a couple hours before bed (either working at my desk or watching TV)…so I can’t really use the “things quiet down” feature. Ideally the ST app would allow you to trigger Goodnight when all phones that have an account are plugged into the charger after a certain time.

It’d also be helpful for early mornings - I travel for business and sometimes catch very early flights, so it’d be great if the app could trigger Good Morning when I unplug my phone.

I’m assuming that would only be available on android? I haven’t heard of iOS apps that can leverage plugging/unplugging from a charger like that.

That may be, I don’t know if iOS allows that or not. Perhaps that’s why ST hasn’t rolled it out already. If there is any way to use charging as a trigger for both Android and iOS, it’d be great if ST could work that into the next SMH.

That being said…I think the much more important issue is the notifications. If I’m out of town and something happens overnight at home, the standard iOS / Android / SmartThings notification may not wake me up. It’d be extremely helpful if ST had its own built-in audio player that could come on at maximum volume and play for several minutes at a loud volume to wake you up.

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.

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. :blush::rage::nauseated_face:

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. :sunglasses: 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.

Let me clarify - I already have a siren connected to the hub, that is plenty loud and will wake everyone up (which is what I want) if there is a security incident and we’re all at home. That’s not the problem.

The problem is when I’m NOT home - in a hotel out of town. If there is a security incident then, the siren would still go off at home but I won’t be home to hear it. All I would get is a notification on my iPhone and my Android tablet - and it’s entirely possible I’d sleep through both of those.

I’m sure I’m not the only ST user who travels, which is why I’m suggesting a feature that would allow a built-in audio player within the ST app (not a physical audio device) that would wake you up when you’re asleep in a hotel and not at home.

If there’s a way to do this currently (preferably with an iPhone, but even an Android tablet) - that’d be helpful, please let me know.

And regardless, I think it’d be a useful addition to a future update of the ST app so that both iOS and Android users could have this option.

Thanks for explaining.

I would think on an android phone that you would be able to do that with a combination of Tasker and something. I don’t know if you would need SharpTools or not. @joshua_lyon should know. :sunglasses:

It can be done on Android with SharpTools and Tasker:

  1. Subscribe to the attribute in SharpTools by long pressing on the device (eg. the alarm attribute of a siren)
  2. Setup a Thing State event plugin in Tasker to trigger on the alarm attribute for your siren
  3. Add a conditional action that plays a loud noise IF the %st_attr_value ~ siren

The above assumes you basically want to trigger a loud sound on your phone anytime the siren is going off. You could also tweak the logic to be triggered on a different condition or add other conditions (like only trigger if you are away from the house).

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On my iPhone I just set the ringtone when I receive an SMS from ST to a much more annoying one than usual, and I turn on “emergency bypass” for that contact so even when I turn on do-not-disturb mode at night, the (loud enough) sms sound comes through and wakes me up.

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very helpful, thanks. Still wish there was an audio player within the app so it’d always be max volume and there’s no risk my ringer isn’t set high enough on my iPhone, but it’ll have to do.

@joshua_lyon thanks for the info, I’ll try that when I get a chance. I remember trying to use SharpTools on my Android tablet a while ago and I couldn’t get it to connect with ST, but I’ll try again.

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I have a Flic (http://flic.io) button on my nightstand so I can trigger good night early. I have it set to automatically trigger if it is quiet downstairs after 10:30pm…or I can trigger it via the Flic. I also have a SmartRules rule that automatically runs good night at 1am no matter what as a fail-safe.

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I just read this entire thread hoping to find any kind of update on what SHM is doing to reply to any of these requests(which is depressing because it goes back 2 plus years). Is the answer nothing, or am I just looking in the wrong place? It would just be nice to know what they are working on and a rough timeline to see if it is worth the effort of switching to a different security app or switching hubs to say iris which I believe has an alarm panel and what I hope is better features(like delays).

So anyway… I really want security delays and a panel would be sweet. I could live without the panel because action tiles but it would still be nice to have something more purpose built that I don’t have to run power to.

Nope you’re pretty much up to date, unfortunately.

I just tried to start a new thread the other day to see if we could get an update from @Tyler about how the certification process for a keypad is going.

Nothing to see there. :unamused:

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I agree with your feature request definitely would be nice to have the app be able to wake the IPhone/Droid from sleep with emergency alert tone of some type. Right now I do this by using a virtual switch when SHM alarms it turns on a virtual switch the virtual swtich is linked to IFTTT Phone applet. When SHM alarms IFTTT calls me with an alert message that I create. Something native would be much nicer though, although IFTTT can play back important information such as your address if other party are involved in your emergency alert chain.

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Why not just have ST send you an SMS directly, rather than go through IFTTT ? Just add ST to your priority contacts so it is sure to actually ring through is phone is silenced.

I believe the OP wants to use the text as the “if” and then have the lights turning off either “that” so that the human doesn’t have to look at it at all.

I didn’t read all the way back up to find OP. just the new post about using virtual switch with IFTTT to call phone.

Thanks for the suggestion I will have to look into that. I already have it send me a push message but its not in my priority contact. I use the mentioned IFTTT integration so that I get an actual phone call with a pre-recorded message, I also have it call friends or family when on vacation in case I don’t have cellular service, I also grant them temp access to my Arlo cams so they can see if everything is ok before dispatching the police. Maybe not ideal but my setup is still fairly new and I want to make sure I am not getting any false alarms before I look into paid monitoring service such as scout.