Using Z-Wave to control your computer?

Devices & Integrations Device Ideas
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I know we can get a Z-Wave USB stick to use a PC as a controller. However, does anyone know how to do the opposite? Or for that matter, since both the PC and SmartThings are web-enabled, could the controller use the web connection to control the laptop without the need for a Z-Wave USB stick?

I would like to use the SmartThings Hub 2 to task a dedicated PC to do certain things based on routines, triggers, and manual controls.

I have an existing whole-house audio system and use apps like Pandora and Spotify to play music over my house system (line inputs to a 10 channel mixing board). I can use my laptop as a player, but I haven’t identified a good way to use a mobile app to control the laptop. If I’m on the other side of the house and want to skip a track, or if I want to turn the volume up/down, I can’t do it without walking to the laptop. It would be great to be able to control some of those basic functions remotely using the SmartThings mobile app.

Additionally, I’d like to be able to include these things with routines -so you can set an alarm to play music when you wake up, or so you can more easily turn it off when you go to sleep, etc.

I would also like to re-purpose a Z-wave panic button for a doorbell. When the button is depressed, the SmartThings controller could tell my laptop to play specific MP3 files, while at the same time turning the lights on, logging the date/time that the button was pressed, etc.

Using the app on your PC to control multiple functions like this would really be ideal because if music was already playing when the doorbell was pressed, then the SmartThings app could pause that music, then play the selected doorbell MP3, then continue playing the music I was previously listening to…

The sound card on my PC is reasonably good quality and I can store pretty much as many MP3s on there as I want -far superior to the available music playing doorbells and with more functionality than more expensive stuff like Sonos.

I’ve tried using my phone to play music over a blue-tooth receiver, but with obvious problems (you hear ALL the phone sounds, not just the music, and if you walk away then it’s going to lose connection and drop off). I’ve also tried using Google Chromecast, but when my phone connects to a wireless access point rather than the main wifi router, I lose sync/control. Neither blue-tooth or Chromecast help with the doorbell.

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Definitely much easier and more powerful to just run a small web server on the PC… Perhaps even Node.

Creating REST-API Endpoints is relatively trivial and calling them from a SmartApp or Device Handler even easier!

Let me know if this makes sense…

In fact, here is an analogous project!..

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Several people have done different projects of this type.

I wouldn’t describe it quite the way you did, it’s not about smartthings “controlling” the computer. It’s simply about triggering services that are run on the computer. But there are a number of ways to do that.

Here are three different examples using Three different operating systems. :sunglasses:

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