So if smart lighting is counted against total routines as is auromations, which one has more optipns? I would say automations.
IMO Routines have more options and are more usable for me. I tried Smart Lighting and quickly went back to my Routines. Just the ability to selectively enable/disable Routines is much more useful for me.
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Are you approaching the 1000 routines limit?
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No, just currious & engaging in conversation. Im still good with room to grow for that stuff.
Smart Lighting lets you do a couple of things that Routines don’t:
- Sync one switch with another.
- Turn a light on with motion and off after a period of no motion, in a single automation.
Outside of those use cases, I prefer Routines because they’ll show up in the Device tab (SL automations don’t) and you can enable them individually as @wags1 mentioned. That hasn’t been enough to get me to spend time converting my automations from SL to Routines, but I do create new automations in Routines unless using one of the two features above.
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I removed SmartLighting and redid everything in Routines and this one is the only thing that bothers me. We have a light over the kitchen sink and it was turn on with motion if sunset - 15 or sunrise + 15 for 10 minutes if it was already off. Worked great and as long as you were still in the area the light stayed on. Now with Routines after 10 minutes it turns off then detects motion and turns back on over and over. I suppose I could make a separate routine that says if there is no motion to turn it off but I’d get caught in a weird situation where right before sunrise it gets turned on by motion then the off routine would never fire unless I made it run all the time and then we couldn’t manually turn it on. Would have to involve virtual devices to hold binary state for manually turned on or automatically and now it’s way to complicated for a motion light.
The ability to turn on and off within a single automation was also nice. Like on at Sunset and off at Sunrise which now has to be two separate routines. But I’ve gotten used to that.
You could eliminate this by only turning it on with the routine, and creating a separate routine to turn it back off after no motion, limited to the same time period. But I agree that it’s an annoying oversight (just like not listing SL routines on Device tabs…)
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I also had automation related to sunset and sunrise but it’s seems impossible to do it in routines.
I have an outside switch light that I set to turn on at sunset (so far so good) but I also set the same light switch to turn off 6 hours before sunrise (kind of a reminder that it’s time to close the day).
I used to do it in Smart Lighting by adding a turn off 360 minutes before sunrise but for some reason in the routines we are limited to 60 minutes only.
I think smartthings can easily fix this as this is just one restriction that need to be taken off.
Who do you think I should approach?
Will Smart Lighting continue to exist etc under the new edge based platform?
It has been updated to a new version specifically to work with the new platform. Most people have already been automatically migrated.
The new version should show up under “smart apps“ below “routines“. Note that the “L“ in lighting is not capitalized in the new version.
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Thank you! I have the lowercase “lighting”.