ST Anything Questions

I have ST Anything working on my Arduino /SmartThings doing most of what I want it to do. Unfortunately last night during a storm I lost internet. My Arduino had control of my had control of my hot water heat. Soooo, the only way to turn it off was to literally turn off the Arduino. Not the best way to go. So I am begging a question:

Is there a local way to control the St Anything without the internet? I have also seen sketches that will allow a small website on the device to turn on/off switches / relays. Can that be added to the sketch without interferance? In a pinch I could use that, may not be pretty but it would work.

Thanks for any ideas

Does your Hot Water Heater have its own built-in thermostat with thermal overload safety? If yes, not sure why this is much of a concern. If not, you really need to be careful! Please, safety first! Also, I believe you should definitely change the ST_Anything sketch to default to OFF, not ON, after a reboot.

You can easily add some ‘local control’ capabilities to ST_Anything, with the simplest being adding a true manual cutoff between the microcontroller and the device you are controlling. Always a very good idea to have a manual cutoff switch.

You can look at the example “ST_Anything_Relays_Buttons_ESP8266” example sketch to see how one method of implementing local control within the sketch. This example makes sure ST_Anything is always up to date and sends the proper updates to ST.

1 Like

Hi Dan,

Don’t worry, all the safeguards are in place. Actually I am turning on a circulator pump for the water to my baseboard heat in one room and that (through other logic controls) turns on the boiler and it will shutdown and all that good stuff. It’s just that when we lost connection to the ST I also lost the ability to turn off the pump. I found out I got a batch of bad DS18 sensors so I do not have a “thermostat – wanna be” for that zone so for now we manually turn on the heat when needed. So I could hookup a manual button somewhere that will change that output to turn things off. What about a Webpage on the Arduino with buttons on there? I don’t expect this will happen all that often. Last night was sorta a “oh didn’t think about that moment” LOL

I have never hosted a web page on an Arduino. I know it is possible. However, since ST_Anything is already running a TCP Server to listen for ST LAN packets, I do not know if it would be a good idea to try to host another HTTP server on the same board.

Why not just default it “Off” upon start-up? Wouldn’t that resolve the issue as well?