Triggering Smartthings From An External Program

Is there any way to trigger smartthings from an external program.

I have a zwave controlled gate to my property. I recently added a nest outdoor cam to monitor the approach to it. I was playing around with Ispy, the surveillance software, and added the Licence Plate Recognition plugin. After testing this and moving the camera about a bit, it is recognising plates with 95-100% confidence in daytime and 80-90% at night.

What I want to do is use this to open the gates. I have used tasker to intercept the email alert from ispy and then sharp tools to trigger the gate, but this only seems to work a couple of times then stops. Ispy can use http post or can trigger an external exe file on detection, so is there any way to interface this with smartthings directly.

Sure. :sunglasses:

There are multiple different ways to do this. You could write your own smart app, I think you could use core (but you should ask the core experts in the core peer Assistance thread to be sure)

or you can just use the IFTTT maker service/channel to receive the post and then the smartthings IFTTT service to trigger whatever you want to have happen on the SmartThings side. For example, I use an I Beacon being detected to trigger SmartThings events because my IBeacon receiving app can send an HTTP post, so I send that to my IFTTT account and use its receipt as the “if” and SmartThings as the " that."

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Whats the delay like with an ifttt channel, obviously I dont want to arrive home and then have to sit there for 15 minutes waiting for the gate to let me in.

Ive used core for quite a lot but cant figure out how core is going to monitor ispy to realise it has recognised a licence plate.

As far as Core, I believe, but I’m not 100% sure, that it can also receive an HTTP post. So that might run a little faster than doing the same thing through IFTTT. But ask in the core peer assistance thread and someone there should know.

With regards to IFTTT, it varies from house to house and applet to applet, although it has gotten somewhat faster than it was about a year ago. At my house, it’s a fairly consistent eight second delay, which is sufficient for many purposes, but not all. You may just have to try it and see.

Brill I will give ifttt a try and also ask over on the core thread. Thank you.

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Before you give up on Tasker, have you checked to see how/why the process is faltering?? I’ve found that when things grind to a halt, there is often a simple fix. I just experienced such a thing in fact. I had a sharptools general display (all events, all parameters) going to test something, and neglected to disable the profile after I was finished. It subsequently got in the way of other profiles running; the moment I disabled it, the other profiles ran correctly again.

I use AutoNotification routinely without issue. I tend to roll with as un-specific a profile as possible. I use regex a lot. I also use regex with Alexa successfully. Sometimes, simply adding a 2-second Wait into a task gives its components time to run correctly…

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Just explained this to someone else earlier…

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Cheers I will try that.