@Tim
IFTTT seems pretty dumb at this point so I don’t use it. I do use SmartThings integration for my Hues, but sometimes it is not in the traditional sense (more on that later). For regular, daily timed events, I use Hue’s scene schedules; it is simply kind of a set and forget type thing.
With SmartThings, I use some SmartApps for simple motion sensor triggered lighting. You can turn on as many Hues as you want within a single event handler in a SmartApp, and set whatever values you want for each. It is pretty versatile, but you may need to get your fingers between the fan blades to do exactly what you want.
For more complicated things, I use scripts. For instance, when I leave my house during the day I want everything to turn off; not just my Hues, but all of my lights (I still have a fair number on Insteon/x10), and my A/V gear and thermostats. Currently SmartThings can’t talk to most of that stuff directly. I control my A/V gear using GC iTachs, and my thermostats are WiFi. Day to day control of that stuff is done from phone and tablet apps, but they don’t directly control SmartThings (and vice versa).
I have a Mac Mini that runs as a media server, and runs Indigo for home automation. The Mac can control anything via executing a script, although I wish SmartThings would provide something more straightforward than oAuth’d endpoints for sending commands thru the hub. But practically anything can communicate with the Mac. iRule, SmartApps, Tasker; and in my situation they do it by sending a simple HTTP GET request with a single parameter.
I wrote a simple HTTP server that runs on the Mac, where I have dozens of scripts that are triggered by the parameter passed in the GET request. As an example, I have a SmartApp that, when the presence sensor is triggered “not present” it simply sends a GET to the Mac with a “everythingOFF” param. When the Mac sees this it runs three scripts that tell the iTach to shutdown all the audio gear, Indigo to turn off all that it controls, the Hue bridge to turn off all lights, and the thermostats to go into standby mode.
Yes, I know that I could have my SmartApp shut down the Hues directly, but since I need to send a GET to the Mac for the A/V gear, I choose to just do it all from the Mac. I just completed another SmartApp this morning. It simply checks for the presence sensor, and that it as after 5pm and if so, sends a Get to my Mac with “playNews”. When it sees this, it fires up the living room and garage systems, tells a TiVo to start playing the 5 o’clock news it last recorded, and turns on some lights.
As I move everything to Zigbee and/or Z-Wave for use with SmartThings, I will eventually retire the Indigo server, but I will keep using my little HTTP server to keep things integrated. If you have a Mac that’s on 24/7, you can check out my app in this post.
I know this may seem like overkill, but I have been doing this for many years, and there still doesn’t exist one app that’s worth a darn that integrates everything. With my setup, all can talk to each other, so I can use my favorite remote app on my phone/tablets (iRule), have Tasker integration from smartphone based events, and have SmartThings call on all of things they can control, and have them control SmartThings.