I am having a Smart Home meltdown

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I am getting closer and closer to pulling out all my smart home things and melting them down in the street. I thought having a smart home to do things automatically supposed to make things easier. Instead, these last several weeks have been extraordinarly frustrating as I am losing functionality between my alexa devices, smartthings devices, and interconnections using IFTTT.

It started when Automatic liquidated and the intellegence of my car went away. This caused me to lose tracking the health of my car. Then Echo Speaks got shut down, followed by migrating from Smartthings Classic to the new SmartThings App that broke my smart home monitor, and all my automations on smartthings and alexa. Now IFTTT is going to this pro part that will cause me to pay for another service or lose more interproduct connectivity.

I am no fan of IFTTT, but it did have some functionality in allowing me to speak to an Alexa device and control my Ecobee preset Climate settings, integrate Life360 (no longer supported on smartthings) to control home and away modes on my thermostat, and a couple of other functions. I hate the fact that I could not find a good way of searching for an appropriate applet and now am about to lose all but 3 applets unless I pay for their pro serviceā€¦ a service I only use to connect different services to talk to each other. If I go pro there, it looks very repetitive to the rules functions I very much enjoy here on Sharptools, except Sharptools works way better for me than IFTTT that I am having a hard time making sense of.

With all the limitations I am now experiencing in smartthings, disruptions with alexa communicating with smartthings, limitations on my ecobee settings with smartthings and alexa, life360 complete disconnection with smartthings, it feels like the world is closing in on functionality of all these devices.

Now that I am done with my rant (thanks for being patient with me), I am now wondering if there is a place for me to save my multiservices set up with the walls that are going up to save routines from smartthings, sharptools, alexa, and ifttt.

I have very limited programming skills, so if there is coding required, I will be in big trouble. My hope is that sharptools can support life360 so I can get it to work with my smart home monitor again, be able to have Alexa trigger climate control settings that only IFTTT can do now, find any kind of alternative to the functions lost from Speaks so that I can realize full potential of my alexas again, and keep things in a simplified location that only requires 1 subscription: sharp tools.

Please see this as a cry for help from someone who want to make their home smarter, but the industry seems to be doing its best to undermine that.

Thanks!

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I think that most of us had feel the same way as you do my friend, but there is always ā€œhopeā€, but it will require some time and some testing to make it work as you wantā€¦

I just finish the transition from ST (SmartThings) to HE (Hubitat Elevation) Hubsā€¦ I done that specifically because the ST is getting more and more unreliable to get the things doneā€¦ and of course there are a few other options, but until nowā€¦ It seams that HE is in middle ground between expert coding skills (for use something like Home Assistant) to a easy to setup as STā€¦

Hubitat allow you to get most of the communications with your devices in your local networkā€¦ BUT you need to download some drivers, maybe flash some other (specially all the TUYA/SmartLife) but isnā€™t as hard as its look at the beginningā€¦

After you finish you could avoid 90% if the issues that you are facing todayā€¦ There are a lot of users in this community and also in HE community that could help youā€¦

I hope this can provide a little light on your Smart home pathā€¦ heheā€¦ :smile:

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Hi @Mark_Montemayor, I am sorry to hear that and I can absolutely feel the pain that many have experienced recently. I agreed with @AVF that many people in the community are willing to share and help, and glad that you have found SharpTools useful and enjoyed. So here are some comments/questions, and hope we can start helping you get your smart home stuff back to normal from here.

Life360 is still supported in SmartThings. In the new app, go to Settings ā†’ Linked Services ->Life360. (Or you have tried this integration, but it stopped updating for you after the migration?)

The Echo Speaks author is working on the Light version, which may support a good amount of the features from Echo Speaks, but anything that require constant polling (status updates) will unlikely to be supported. So letā€™s see.

Though some Ecobee comfort profile changing commands, like home and away, are exposed through SmartThings integrations, they donā€™t seem to affect the comfort setting based on my tests. (I have not tried any other community developed device handler.) But you can set the cooling/heating point in Rule Engine based on Life360 presence state no problem.

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I have personally disconnected from IFTTT. I also wasnā€™t too happy with how slow it would be sometimes to respond. With Sharptools rule engine and the smarthings rule engine I have everything work back as it should. Even if IFTTT rolls back itā€™s changes I probably wonā€™t go back.

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Thank you for the advice, James.

I ran the Life360 through Linked Services, but am not seeing it in the Smart Apps. I am seeing my family members in all devices. However, when all of the family leaves, the automation that triggers the Smart Home Monitor does not run. I did check the triggers and they are intact. Other automations that run based on my presence through Life360 do run, but smart home monitor does not.

Any walk throughs or tutorials on how I can substitute the comfort zones of my ecobee based on presence? I noticed I think I could probably go through triggering the normal program on ecobee, but am not sure how to do away. Also, if I want to perform ecobee commands through Alexa, would I have to create a virtual switch to trigger some actions?

Thanks, James.
Mark

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Thank you for the insights, AVF. I was hopeful ST would continue to be reliable, but I am noticing a lot of inconsistency in its performance on commands. I especially have problems with ST wifi based plugs. Never again on that. They respond probably 60% of the time and seem to not perform when I most need them.

For a dunce like me, what is required for the HE?

Thanks.
Mark

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I assume you have completed the Classic App to New app migration, and Smart Home Monitor (SHM) is not supported after the migration. So you will have to use the SmartThings Home Monitor(STHM) instead. See below for the difference between SHM and STHM, and how to use STHM. (STHM API is not open to any 3rd party yet, and the workarounds are included in the post too.)

I wasnā€™t able to change the comfort setting via Rule Engine neither webCoRe. It seems not supported via the stock SmartThings Ecobee integration. (Ex: I can ā€œresume programā€, but not able to set it to ā€œHomeā€ specifically.) Although I have seen other people using community developed device handler, and able to change the comfort settings, but I did not have any personal experience with those device handlers though.

You can just enable the Ecobee Plus skill in Alexa to voice command the Ecobee. For examples:

  • ā€œAlexa, ask ecobee to set the temperature to degreesā€
  • ā€œAlexa, ask ecobee to set to home/away/sleepā€

And see the complete supported commands below.
https://support.ecobee.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002790988#ecobeeskill

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Well, first of all, that devices are you trying to control?? There is a compatibility list (List of Compatible Devices - Hubitat Documentation) that could help you see if the devices you are trying to control can be managed by HEā€¦

IF you are trying to use Tuya/SmartFile devices, you can gain better response time on either ST or HE if you flash themā€¦ (not an easy task but If you can pull it off its greatly improve the responses of your devices, and there is a TON of youtube tutorials on how to do itā€¦)

If you can find it in the list, search on the forums, normally someone already ask them about the devices you already have :wink:

Let us know how everything goesā€¦