Some questions about group containers and illumination events

The SmartThings documentation talks about group containers, which would represent areas like kitchen, living room, etc and would allow you to organize your Things by “group”. I don’t see anything back from that concept in the IDE or mobile app. Is that correct?

If I understand the documenation correctly, it is possible to program input which would be entered when adding a device. Has anyone done this? Would it be possible to assign the group at that time?

When adding a Motion Alert, the app will ask you to add an area or room. If I understand correctly, this is only used to identify the events in the “Recently” list, but nothing to do with the group containers?

The app allows me to control lighting on contact sensor, motion sensor, schedule, etc. I have not seen the ability to control based iluminance. What I would like to for example "if motion has been detected and iluminance is less than x lux, turn on light. How do I accomplish this?

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Hi Paul.

I suggest that you including a hyperlink to the specific reference in the Documentation if you want responses to accurately reflect the term or concept.

Groups do indeed exist in the Mobile App in the Things panel. Just drag one Thing on top of another and a Group will start to form.

Unfortunately, a Thing can only become to one Group – I’d much rather see Things have Tags (so a Group could be a dynamic filter of a Tag or list of Tags) and/or the ability to create an arbitrary number of “shortcuts” of any Thing so that each shortcut could be placed in a different Group (then you could a motion detector in the Kitchen Group as well as the Security Group.

But now: The DASHBOARD view in the Mobile App is actually relatively new, and it introduced a limited version of the Shortcut feature. The Lights & Switches panel, for example, presents a Shortcut to each of your Lights & Switches that you decide to add to it, manually or through auto-search. And you can give these Shortcuts aliases … and a Shortcut can also represent a group of Things (but they must all be of same or similar capability – i.e., all lights).

You second question regarding the use of luminance is possible IF capability.luminance is provided by your sensor, AND if you write a SmartApp that uses that capability in the way you describe.

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@tgauchat Thank you very much for your feedback.

I was referring to this page http://docs.smartthings.com/en/latest/introduction/smartthings-concepts.html

I wasn’t aware that it is possible. I am certainly going to try that. Still it would be nice to be able to assign the group during pairing.

I wouldn’t mind giving a stab at adding illumine to the smart app. @Ben I have seen reference device types and the IDE allows them to be used as a start for your own device type. Is the source of the SmartThings smart apps available?

When you start to create a new SmartApp in the IDE, you’ll find a pull down with example code for lots of official SmartApps and another section for Community shared SmartApps.

Take a look around, or I’ll paste a screen shot here.

I found the code. Thanks. @tgauchat

I was also able to group the sensors. This works well and is also exposed in the IDE,

I have multi sensors and I would like to have an additional tile which shows the temperature in the room. Is this possible?

Secondly, is it possible to change the icon / background color of the group icon based on the status of the icons in the group?