Different community members have done different variations on this idea. I would agree that at this point core could probably do everything and would be the most versatile approach.
CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.”
Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you.
For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog.
But you might also check the miscellaneous quick browse lists in both the device type handler and smart app sections in the community – created wiki. For Example, there is one there that is an MQTT bridge. And there’s this:
I’ve switched from X10 to ZWave but still have a handful of X10 devices that needed control.
I installed Home Genie on a Raspberry Pi which gives me control of my devices via an HTTP call and I wanted a way to control this with SmartThings.
With the help of @tguerena we’ve come up with URI Switch.
URI Switch is a Device Handler that when attached to a Virtual Switch, kicks off a URL (External or Internal) when an On/Off command is sent
Please refer to the following for instructions and usage information
http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=URI_Switch
While this was created for sending ON / OFF commands for my X10 devices, the ON / OFF commands could be a call to anything that takes a URI to control.
Please let us know how this works for you and let us know what we can add…
To explore others:
http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section