Texting PIN code to Smartthings hub?

Correct, SMS… I assumed the system/device already had the capability to receive SMS. When I set up my contact it messaged me 2 opt out words I could reply back and not get notifications.

Why not automate it and give then a smartthings presence sensor to control it?

As far as I’m aware, SmartThings cannot directly receive SMS messages. The reason I asked if you have an Android device is you could use it to relay actions to SmartThings.

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Just trying to get away from having to keep track and give out something, I would just continue to give out the garage door remote. Thanks…

I’m sure I could get one for cheap if I needed to. How would I go about using it as a relay, is that discussed here in the forum somewhere?

Very old post on someone doing this:

If you wanted to go the Android route it would be something like the following:

The Android device would have Tasker and SharpTools on it. Tasker would be setup such that whenever an SMS is received, it would tell SharpTools to control the garage door on SmartThings.

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Action Tiles can do this. Set up a panel with the garage door control and share that panel. That will be the only thing they have access to.

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Interesting… Are you familuar with Tasker or SharpTools? It is able to be set up so that certain people (or certain codes)have permission or is it any text it receives? I’ll have to look into these other apps. Thanks

This is exactly what I was thinking,

Yes, I wrote SharpTools. :slight_smile:

Yes, with Tasker you can setup conditions to determine what action to take. For example, you might create a whitelist where only a certain group of people had access to control the garage. Or set a time window so people on the whitelist could only do it during a certain point in time.

I would warn that Tasker is a bit more for tinkerers, but your use case is a great example to get started with. It’s relatively basic at the surface level, but you could add on more features/conditions as you desire.

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But that requires them to buy the app just to control my garage doors… correct?

The other approaches are great alternatives too.

Twilio is probably a bit more effort to get setup, but it also has no hardware dependencies. If you already had a spare Android device, then the Tasker approach is great as you can just use what you already have. But if you don’t already have an Android device, then it might make sense to go through the bit of extra effort to get Twilio setup, especially if the DTH @ritchierich linked to already connects things together.

That being said, you could also repurpose the Android device to do other things like serve as a dashboard, motion sensor, camera, etc, etc.

The web-based dashboard approach is also a good approach. With either setup, your friends would have to remember something. With the text message, they’d need to program the number into their phone. With the dashboard, they’d need to bookmark the address.

The other nice thing about texting is most phones support texting by voice now: eg. "Hey Siri, text Andrew's Garage 'open sesame'"

Yes, ActionTiles does require a purchase, but it does come with a 2 week free trial before needing to be purchased. You may only need to give them access to the garage door today, but you may find that you want to add additional tiles to a panel that they can access or a different panel created for someone else with more than just access to the garage door in the future.

With AT, you have a 1 to 1 device equivalent from SmartThings and can display only the things you want shown and when those devices you want to display on the panel, they can be pin code restricted (when they press the Tile, they are required to enter a 4 digit code) before being able to open/close or turn on/off a device. Just an additional avenue to look at.

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They don’t have to buy the app, you would. But once you create a panel you can share it with anybody. It is just a web page. They do have to have a login, but that doesn’t cost anything. I do this for a neighbort to give her access to control our alarm and doors if needed.

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Here’s an idea how things would look in the Tasker approach:

  1. Create a new Profile → Event → Phone: Received Text
  2. Configure the profile with your desired filters (who it came from, what the message says)
  3. Configure the action to open your garage

image

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Would it work equally well to run Tasker and Sharptools on OP’s own Android device? Then the housesitter could just text him the magic word with no extra equipment. It does rely on his phone being available though, so no good if he’s on a plane or out of the country / service area.

Yes, it could run on his own device assuming he had an Android phone.

The caveats you mentioned are why I would normally recommend a dedicated device for this kind of thing.

I’ve seen some similar automations where it was fine to run directly on their own device. For example, I had one user flash lights in their house whenever their phone rings (great use case for the deaf).

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Tagging @tgauchat @anon36505037

I can think of several different ways to do this, but I’m getting a little out of touch, so I will let others respond. I just tagged a couple of people who might have some more ideas. :sunglasses:

I would add that one easy way to do it would be to send email to a Gmail account and use that as the trigger in an IFTTT applet. But I would be concerned about the security in that approach.

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The SMS / SharpTools / Tasker approach is clever, but certainly is more complicated and risky than ActionTiles.

We built “Secure Panel Sharing” (along with PIN Protected Tiles) into ActionTiles particularly for your use case, @Astevens.

The free trial period is lots of time to make sure this works as per your requirements.

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