I have 6 Ring door Sensors that i connected to my smartthings hub, and i followed a guide to connect them all to my sharptools dashboard as well. im trying to figure out a way to ‘arm’ / ‘disarm’ them from my tablet/sharptools. Very frustrating, i just want to be able to select the ‘night’ mode and all my alarms be setup to send me notifications or ring if they are opened. Any help would be great, thankyou.
Unfortunately, SmartThings made this more complicated when they introduced the “new” SmartThings Home Monitor (STHM) circa 2019.
Previously, integrations could directly control Smart Home Monitor, but the new system requires you to setup routines within the SmartThings mobile app to either connect Virtual Switches or Location Modes to your SmartThings Home Monitor State.
Check out the following article which also has a link to a YouTube video which demonstrates how you might do this.
Also note that nuance in the previous reply that there are two different “modes” in SmartThings.
- SmartThings Home Monitor - the ‘alarm’ type functionality
- Location Mode - a generic indicator of the ‘mode’ your system is in that you can use in routines and automations as a condition
So if you wanted to be able to change your Location Mode to Night (eg. from your SharpTools dashboard) and then have SmartThings Home Monitor automatically change to ‘Arm (stay)’, you could do that with a Routine in the SmartThings mobile app.
I suspect that would look something like the following:
So in this scenario the mode feature in sharptools would be acting as like the way to activate and deactivate the alarms?
Right now i made an automation on Smart Things for : if location mode Night, then Armed (stay), so would that then mean when i set the mode in sharptools to Night it will also affect the Smartthings settings?
Yes, if you have the mode from SmartThings on your dashboard, then when you change the mode using that tile, it’s changing the location mode in SmartThings and should change your STHM through your routine.
I would suggest giving it a quick try to make sure it works as you expect. 
Okay SO when i select the mode now that is setup it sends me a notification which is good. but i was also hoping to be able to enter a pin or like have one button that says ‘armed’ or ‘disarm’ to do the same thing
You could add a PIN to the mode tile:
Also keep in mind that you can add specific modes to your dashboard and PIN protect just those tiles.
The top one is the “picker” layout which shows a list of all the modes you can choose from when you tap it. If you tap any of the named modes below that, it adds a tile that always changes the mode to the specified mode.
So there isnt a way for me to have like a tile that says ‘Arm/disarm’ and when i click it to enter pin it will toggle the alarm system ?
You could use Virtual Switches as shown in the thread I linked above (which also has a YouTube video demonstrating the same approach):
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I was watching the video and most of it is outdated, like on ios you cant even find the option on smarthings to create virtual devices. theres only 4 experimental options. Itsa just a bit confusing for a rookie like myself .
I just updated the article as the IDE is no longer available, but there are four different community drivers for “Virtual Switches” which you could use.
@Justin_Newbury have you done any videos on creating Virtual Switches using drivers in SmartThings?
I found that wiki with the community drivers but was a bit skeptical. How does that work? I have downloaded and used the driver that allowed Smart things to recognize my Ring Door Sensors as sensors and give me more options for them! Which that was nice. But is there something i can download to do what i have discussed? Or is the driver more so a tool i can use to create what i want?
Perfect ill check that one out!
Drivers are a way to integrate devices into SmartThings. Sometimes people create drivers for devices that SmartThings doesn’t officially support and other times people take a copy of an existing SmartThings device driver and add more features to it.
For Virtual Devices, yes, the idea is that you could create a ‘virtual’ copy of a device that only exists digitally and doesn’t actually control a physical device. Oftentimes these are used as a “proxy” for representing the state of things. In this case, you could mirror the STHM state over to a set of Virtual Switches (and vice-a-versa).
Some people also create virtual switches and then expose them to Google Home or Alexa. Then if Google Home or Alexa has an integration that SmartThings doesn’t, you could use the routine/automation feature of your respective voice assistant to map the state of the ‘real’ device to the virtual switch. For example, you might have an esoteric vacuum that only integrates with Alexa. You could connect the vacuum to Alexa along with a virtual switch from SmartThings. Then you could create a routine in Alexa that turns the vacuum on anytime the virtual switch is turned on… or returns it to it’s dock when the virtual switch is turned off. This at least lets you expose some basic functionality to SmartThings even if SmartThings doesn’t have a native integration, but Alexa does.
Stick to it. It is possible with the virtual switches. I will say it is much easier over on Hubitat
Not to make it more complicated for you, but just so you know there’s more options.
I don’t use any of the Smartthings modes, as a matter of fact, I don’t use Smartthings for anything but connect my devices. Everything is controlled by Sharptools, including my alarm.
With the use of variables, I can quite easily automatically control everything. Our phones connect with a presence detection by wifi. The rules setup control a variable for each of us with states, present, away, sleeping. The alarm control is then done by checking what the status of the other person is, wether it needs to arm or not.
This is also tied into the lighting, so it can decide to turn on the lights by sundown or when we arrive home.
So I only need variables and don’t have any virtual switches, except for the presence detection. But that never worked on our phones for some reason, that’s why I use wifi.