I’ve new to smartthings so I apologize if this has already been discussed, I searched the forum but couldn’t find anything on the topic. Here is what I want to do:
I want to give certain people access to my garage door (open/close) without putting them on my account and having access to everything. When we go out of town we have friends come watch the house any they typically park their cars in our garage. I just purchased the Konnected and am looking at installing it on both garage doors to be able to open/close them remotely so I am getting rid of the garage door remotes. I’ve set up my schlage connect locks to text me when my boys use their code (get home from school), is there a way to set up a virtual keypad in smartthings and have someone text a code and operate the garage doors? I could always put a keypad outside the garage doors but that would require getting out punching the button and getting back in and that defeats the point of automation Thanks…
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).