SmartThings compared to Fibaro, Vera, Domoticz etc--a few specific integration questions

[dhanjel (Daniel Jansson)]

Hi!

I´ve been interested in home automation for a couple of years and have tested a variety of controllers, including Fibaro Home Center 2, Micasa Verde Vera Edge, OpenHab, Domoticz.
They all work pretty well, but I haven´t found anyone that feels complete.

Smart things looks interesting since it has a nice layout and good support for devices and the community. I´m interested in buying either a Amazon Echo or Google Home and they seem to play along nice with Smart things as far as I´ve read.

What I feel is vague about smartthings (or perhaps it is due to lacking google skills), is how to write scenes / scenarios.
Basically, I want to be able to do things like this. Is it possible with smartthings without the need for additional servers or similar?

• Get a notification via telegram when the dishwasher is done (the consumption is below for instance 4W for at least 3 minutes)
• Start playing a Spotify playlist on my Sonos system in the bathroom as long as there is motion in there (+ ~10min) and as long as the hose isn´t in “we´re sleeping” mode
• Start the heater for the car in the appropriate amount of time before leaving for work based on the outside temperature
• Arm the house using a Zipato Keypad and send camera snapshots through Telegram if there is any motion detected in a selected number of sensors.

Unfortunately the SmartThings-lineup is not available in Sweden, but I can always order from Currys (UK) for example using Borderlinx since we share the same z-wave frequenzy.

Another question I thought of, with regards to that the Smartthings hub is cloud based. If I have a schedule to turn of my lights at sunset for example, will that work even if internet access is lost or is it completely dependent on a connection to aws?

[gembrain (NigelT)]

I’m brand new to Smartthings so maybe not the best to answer but I have also been trying out Fibaro (and Lightify as I like the Osram RGBW)

I’ve had the Smartthings starter kit for less than a week but confident that everything on your list could be done. There are some very clever and active people on this community. Check out CoRE for starters - very powerful.

However, looks like most stuff IS done via the cloud and the problem seems to be the standard home automation issue of reliability! It does seem though that they are finally actively addressing the issue…

I’m a UK user and will be watching the next few months with interest

I like the feel of the system and the community more than Fibaro and I know that if the HC2 physically goes wrong that I will be without any automation while it goes back to Poland!

[Automated_House (Jimmy)]

Does telegram have IFTTT integration or a way to setup a traditional phone number?

[JDRoberts]

This FAQ discusses the basic ways of setting up scenarios.

A Short Intro to Scheduling/Device Control/Rules in SmartThings Classic

(March 2018: All of the following applies only to the SmartThings Classic app. If you purchased your hub after March 1, 2018 and are using the new “SmartThings (Samsung Connect)” app, creating rules works differently.) You’ve got your hub. You’ve got some devices. Now how do you schedule what happens when? SmartThings doesn’t have a rules engine/scheduler, so there’s no one tutorial for how to do this. But it’s an open platform, and there are about 12 different ways to set up various kinds of schedules. Some require custom code, some don’t. A “scheduler” in this context is anything that causes a networked device to perform an action, even if it’s just to toggle on or off immediately. (Network engineering definition, forgive me. ) (Note: as of April 2017, the original author of …

For specifics, there’s no question that core is currently the most powerful method:

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…

If you have an android phone, the third-party app, sharp tools, allows you to create an integration between smart things and Tasker which then enables many third-party integrations.

Or, as others have mentioned, smartthings does have an IFTTT channel. And it allows you to create virtual switches. So once you combine those, you have a very powerful IFTTT function.