SmartThings Notifications as RSS?

Wondering if there’s a way to get my personal SmartThings notifications via RSS. I’d like to get them on RSS so that I can visualize them in ActionTiles and not have to rely on the specific device I’m on. I’ve looked at Pushbullet, but I don’t see a way to see those as an RSS feed…only bringing in an RSS feed to push info to Pushbullet (the opposite of what I’d like). Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

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The original SmartTiles created a “web page” inside SmartThings Cloud. I can’t exactly encourage this method, as SmartThings essentially discouraged it; but if you’re clever, this could be a very direct approach but with complications: No way for the RSS reader to login, for example?

So…
A SmartApp can use REST-API to push events in JSON format to a simple server (PHP based, with text or MySQL) or a cloud service like Firebase. Then an equally simple web server can feed this up in RSS compliant format (XML).

RSS is a pull protocol, I think… not a push. That’s why I think you need an intermediary service and server. I think.

Maybe it’s just me…but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Are you talking about the notifications that show up as push notifications via the ST app? Or are you talking about something else? The whole point of notifications is that they show up right away. If you have the ST app on more than one device the notification will show up on all of your devices. I’m really not understanding what you’re trying to have show through RSS.

Instead of trying to do something with RSS, you could always do something like this.

If you are running Android, you can take every ST notification you receive on your phone and insert the text, time, etc into Google Sheets. You can do this with an Applet in IFTTT. Your Trigger Service would be Android Device using Notifications received and specifying SmartThings for the App Name and then your Action Service would be Google sheets and you would write the output to a spreadsheet on Google Drive

Then in ActionTiles (a different machine than your phone you could create a shortcut to your Google Sheet (stored on Google drive) file and then directly view a consolidated list of ALL Notifications or specific Notifications written to that file.

I think this would be more achievable than trying to get things into a feed that you could then view from AT.

Just an additional thought for you. I do something similar for tracking Person events from my Nest cameras that I keep in a file that I can view historical events and also gives me a shortcut url in one of the columns for the captured image. :slight_smile:

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So you have the idea…I’d like all my push notifications via RSS. I’d like to be able to display them as part of an ActionTiles dashboard so I don’t have to pull the notifications from that device; they just show up on the dashboard. I’ve been using a dashboard because I’m not allowed to have personal electronic devices at work, so I don’t have the luxury of the automated ST notifications (nor do I want them all via email). Trying to consolidate everything into something portable like AT so it doesn’t matter whether it’s my wall-mounted Fire Tablet or my web browser at work, I still have everything.

I have an old android phone, so I’m going to give this a try. This might be exactly what I needed! Thank you!

Was just reading this and setup the method @WB70 specified above. Once I had ST notifications flowing into a Sheets doc, I then googled. “RSS from a Google Sheets doc”
:slight_smile:

I’m sure there are plenty of methods if you want RSS output. Here is the first search result.

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TBH, Event History storage and display is obviously something that ActionTiles is best able to implement efficiently.

But just like there are dozens of “obvious” features that SmartThings chooses to defer or reject (including, ironically, a consumer web user interface option), ActionTiles has a few major areas we will focus on before Event History management.

We love threads like this because it provides proof of concept examples (and interim solutions) to learn from.

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Well, I don’t have it feeding from my old Android device just yet (on vacation), but I have a proof of concept fully functional.

Thank you all for your help and brilliant ideas!

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Cool. Another option could be to setup a microblog of the events using IFTTT + Weebly

From there, you can also pull an RSS feed of your blog entries if you want to take in RSS.

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I tried this but when I use the base64 method that’s posted an actiontiles forum it didn’t give me a proper decode

Did you use the base,64 code method and the media tile generator from actiontiles?

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Quick update: so Google killed their integrated “publish as rss” feature from Sheets, so Zapier is the only direct method to go straight from google sheets to RSS. Only problem with Zapier is that it costs $$$.

I’ll look into Weebly. That might work.

In the meantime, I’ve set my google sheet to descending order as far as time notification was received. Then I set it to publish as a website, then set up a URL shortcut. It’s not fully integrated and visible, but it gives me somewhere to go to see the latest notifications, even when I’m not near my phone.

@BBoy486 I got the same issue. I’m guessing it’s an issue with Weebly and the base64 method not interacting well.

Zapier does have a free account.

It does, but it’ll only do 100 runs of the “zap” every month. Even running every 15 minutes, that’ll obviously run out real quick.

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Quick comment back from me. I was reading this post and simply offered up a simple method to try out.

I first tried setting up the Google sheets archive method. Was easy enough to achieve, but then the challenge of turning this back into RSS. As I suggested, googling Sheets to RSS had a bunch of options. I tested and got working the first result, Zapier - as commented back, Zapier is a paid service so probably not viable unless you’re already using this via other needs.

I’ve played with Weebly previously to get ST notifications into a private blog. Weebly allow you to take blog content into a standard/simple RSS feed. So job done if that was the need.

A word of caution, Weebly free tier doesn’t allow you to password pages so you have to hide the blog page and delist your site from search results to provide some level of security. Paid Weebly tiers provide more security features.

Getting ST to Weebly is easy to achieve via IFTTT.

I don’t have a burning need to see all my Notifications via RSS although I can see why folks might.

I’ve been playing with a customized version of the Notify Me Smart app - I wanted to modify the actual notifications text to try and make them more wordsmith friendly so if I were to pull into something like a personal blog, or on to other vehicles via rss, they’d read a little more informative.

I’m not sure if Weebly provide a template to show embedded snippets of your own blog within site pages. That could be cool to embed a micro page in actionTiles or ImperiHome to display your last notification or a subset of notifications for a particular device type.

That’s what I love about this platform and this community - loads of great ideas, many options to make our smart homes smarter :slight_smile:

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So I’m not entirely sure why it happened, but Weebly RSS results started working for me overnight. I guess I had to give it some time to start connecting all the dots. It’s working perfectly. For anyone who wants to try it, the only thing to remember is to set the NotificationMessage as the Title in the IFTTT trigger. That’s the only way you’ll see the actual message in the RSS feed.

I love the group here and all the great ideas to cobble the crazy crap happening in my head together with what we all have. Definitely appreciate all the assistance!

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Good to hear. You’ve got me messing now with additional options/use cases.

Looking at a few RSS feed reader solutions I can embed in locally hosted pages running on a ras pi;

Sample use case, display a simple micro page friendly to my dashboard solution showing me last time dogs were fed.(via motion sensor stuck to the inside lid of their food bin).

jQuery feed reader picks up a particular Weebly blog in RSS format and restricted to only show the last entry :slight_smile:

Smart home bliss restored in the world

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Couple months ago I was trying to do something like this with Google Sheets as well since I already had a WebCoRE to Sheets EventHistory going. Now I tried IFTTT->Weebly RSS Feed but it wasn’t showing up so I tried IFTTT->Blogger RSS Feed and that is working for me.

FYI you can play with the &layout=2x1& MTG option to make it fit text better/worse.
Only issue I’m having is that the 4 RSS entries/events don’t seem to show up in proper order. Instead of

1-newest
2
3
4-oldest

it shows as

4-oldest
1-newest
2
3