Smartthings Rules, Triggers, Conditions

[JDRoberts]

This should help as a starting place. ( this is a clickable link.)

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 …

And as others have said, right now core gives you the most options, particularly stacked conditionals:

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 [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface.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…

So as long as we are talking about Z wave, zigbee home automation, Devices with IFTTT services/channels, or cloud services with open APIs, there is very little that SmartThings can’t do in terms of accessing the features of those devices.

However, most of the SmartThings architecture is cloud-based, and it doesn’t run particularly reliably.

The company is very aware of the reliability issue and has made improving that a top priority, they just aren’t there yet.

But for flexibility and versatility, it is certainly a leader among low-cost systems. And that includes the available triggers and rule sets.