What is lacking or am I missing something?

I love this thing, it has made a lot of the menial task in my home easier and lots of fun to play with. However, I am finding true full automation impossible. There is no “and” statement, no “or” statement and no “not” statement. This makes true automation very difficult. I realize I am a control tech by trade so I have some advanced things I want to automate with out pulling 9 miles of wire through my home. For example, IF the outside air is greater than 70 degrees AND the average temperature in my home is greater than the set point THEN trigger outside air damper AND intake fan. This is just one example but there are many applications for these statements. I also am having to get creative with sequencers and UMX style boards to replicate analog functions, such as 0-100% actuation. Any help out there or am I asking just a bit to much. Thanks for the help in advance.

You can create pretty much any control logic with any devices you want if you’re willing to write your own apps. If not, your stuck with the stock apps and what others have shared (which can be quite the Easter egg hunt).

You might search here for CoRE, although I haven’t used it. Writing my own SmartApps actually keeps things simpler, and SmartThings works better with simple.

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If you have an iOS device you can also look for SmartRules (in this forum and apple app store for $9.99 or free for testing 1 rule). http://smartrulesapp.com/

CoRE is great and free and it can do almost anything you want but still in development and may take another month or two to go live.

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Thanks Gents

I guess I will be learning how to write smart apps. Hopefully someone from smart things will add this to the wish list and make it happen. It would greatly increase the usability of the product.

To make the hunt for smart apps that other community members have written easier, the community-created wiki has quick browse links by tag for the “community-created” sections of the forum. So you can look at just a list of Smartapps for lighting, or security, or alerts, etc.:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section

That said, if you have an iOS device, SmartRules is a third-party rules engine app which does make things much easier for many use cases. I found the $10 price tag well worth it.:

http://smartrulesapp.com

For another alternative, as was mentioned, CoRE is a free community-created rules engine currently in the early design stages. Very powerful, very sophisticated, but also can be challenging to use. And since it’s in such early stages, you may have to occasionally delete everything you’ve set up and reenter it. Still you get a chance to help influence the design. And just as importantly for this thread, it demonstrates just how complex and/or logic can get in smartthings if you do you start writing custom code.

So the capabilities are there, it’s just with the exception of smart rules, they aren’t available with an intuitive interface:

I see someone above mentioned CoRE… you don’t like it? It seems to do just about everything you are asking in your OP. Admittedly, it is still in alpha, but the dev is very good and I’ve been running in error free (through daily upgrades to the app) for 2 weeks.

The logic possibilities are expanding by the day …

EDIT: same time reply… his is better ^^^^ :smiley:

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A “rules editor / engine” has been on the “wish list” since Day 1 of the Kickstarter that launched SmartThings. Don’t hold your breath.

SmartThing decided to “think outside the box” and center automations around the concept of limited use case, parameterized SmartApps (i.e., a SmartApp is for a specific use case like … Water my lawn when it hasn’t rained in X days … Where the only input from the user is: (a) the watering and weather devices, and (b) the number of days since rain.

This is still the focus of the platform. It gives lots of opportunities for developers to build hundreds and hundreds of “strong” single-use case SmartApps that are easy to debug, review, QA, publish, and support.