Becoming a Master at SmartThings webCoRE

hey what's up this is Reid recently I did a video on smart things and I just touched on wet core but a lot of you commented how you wanted to know more about web core so thank you so much for your feedback I read all of your questions and so today's video is gonna take you from I don't really know much about web core - I feel pretty comfortable using it now by the end of this video there are a few reasons why automating a web core is better than just using the smart things app first you can add more advanced logic for when automation should run using web core I'll explain by giving you an example I have a motion sensor that turns on my kitchen lights when I'm walking towards the kitchen and it automatically turns off the lights if there's no motion but say I'm cooking I'm not moving around much I don't want the lights to turn off automatically while mid cooking and so I can manually override that using web core I can have a motion sensor turn on the lights in ninety-eight percent brightness I hold up the dimmer switch it will turn up to a hundred percent brightness and when there's no motion if it's at a hundred percent brightness it will automatically turn off the lights so that's pretty easy to do a web core and I don't think I can do that in smart things you can also get web core to send and received if if this and that commands you can get your automations to work together where the variables you can have things run synchronously or asynchronously you can just really dial in your automations to work the way you want them to now let's go over those things by talking about the ins and outs of web core and I'll give you some specific examples on how you can implement it if you don't already have web porn installed you can add it by adding the web core smart app and smart things and I'll link to the video on how to install it down in the description and once you install it you can add all the devices and smart things into web core once it's installed the first thing you'll want to do is create a piston to automate something to start off I would enable the first four toggles that give you extra functionality when editing the piston you can disable them if you think it's too distracting but I think it's helpful especially if you're looking at an example online and you want to know how they did certain things the first thing you'd probably want to add is an if block and this is like if something happens then do something so if a motion sensor senses motion then turn on the light and you can do multiple things for the if-statement so if it senses motion and it's at night and you're home then turn on the light and you can get a little more complicated with them else if it senses motion and it's at night and you're not home then send yourself a push notification in the events section you'll want it to do an action and so you'll select that action block and this can change a physical device like turning a light on but if you wanted to do something else that doesn't involve a physical device then leave it as default as the location and this kind of tripped me up because sometimes I wanted to change something else and I didn't know what to do just leave it as location and then you can have it change other things and the next thing is variables and local variables are something that you can give a value to like a true or false and that can just live only in the piston so it's not shared with other Pistons that is a global variable and you can share that with other Pistons there's also device variables so if you want to have multiple lights and give it one name so that that way when you're doing a lot of different automations with all of those lights you can just reference that one device name and save yourself some time I'll explain how to use variables with an example I use with a motion sensor and a light in motion sensor light can be a little annoying because sometimes the light turns off too fast or it takes too long to turn off the light I made it so if I walk into the room and I'm in the room for less than a minute and I walk out so I'm just quickly grabbing something and leaving the light will automatically turn off after 10 seconds of no motion if it's been under a minute but if I've been in the room for over a minute it'll take five minutes to turn off the light so that way it's not automatically turning off the light when I'm in the room so I did that with a local variable and if it's been over a minute it sets that variable to true and when it goes to turn off the light checks for that variable if it's set and if it is it will automatically turn off the light until five minutes I'll share this piston with you guys that you can import yourself and I'll show you how to do that one thing to know is the properties at the top right if you select a block the default is to run synchronously so it will run step-by-step so if it has a wait time it will wait before it runs the next step but if you change it to run asynchronously then I'll run all the steps at the same time another thing that's useful is logs and once you save the piston you can enable the logs I can also write to the logs in the piston and that way I can ensure that certain things are happening and I use this to kind of debug things and make sure things are working correctly now that you know how Pistons work I want to show you a few more things using web core with if this and that you can have it send or received if commands and the reason why you might want it to receive an if command is that you might want to use your favorite voice assistant to trigger a piston you can set that up in web core by using an if block and then selecting virtual device and then selecting IFFT execute value just type in whatever you want just whatever command and you'll see it generates a URL then you open up the if application you can select create a new applet and select google assistant exceda depending on which one you want to use then web hooks and that's where you paste in the URL but just generated in web core and then I just changed my application JSON and so when you use that command or whatever you want to say to like Google assistant it will trigger that piston in web core if you want web core to send if commands you'll need to go into the settings and web core and go to integrations follow the steps there you know we'll have you generate a maker URL and you'll paste that in there and hit apply down at the bottom if you wanted to send an IFFT command in web core select an action block in web core and then leave it as location remember what we talked about and then select send an if maker event in the Val you can put whatever you want I usually don't put spaces here I'll use underscores so that there's no issues now to make it do something in the if tap for if use web hooks and put in that event name what you just put is that value and then you can have it do something like turn on a light or whatever you want it to do another thing that you can do with web core and I got this idea from Taylor tech who did a video on web core so shout out to him is that you can have an outlet that monitors how much energy it's using and you can hook that up to a washing machine when it drops below so Wantage so the washing machine is done it can send you a push notification if you want to share a piston that you've created you can select the green camera button and what that will do is will generate a little unique code and it will change all the device names to generic names so it won't invade your privacy if someone wants to import that piston or if you want to import a piston from example that you found online then go to web core and click on new piston then select restore a piston using a backup code then enter in that code and it will automatically import that piston the last two things I wanted to talk about our fuel streams and dashboard and fuel strains will graph out your data and you can push that from your piston you can right to the fuel stream unlike data points such as like temperature of sensors I wasn't able to get this to work online people are saying that the servers might be overloaded I Nabal doll things in the settings and so hopefully this will work in a future dashboard is like a snapshot of all your devices and sensors it will show you the battery percentage and what the temperature is you can't toggle anything here but it just looks good it's been fun to see all the different possibilities that you can do with web core and I'll be making more videos on different automation ideas in the future so subscribe if you're not already thanks for watching we'll see you again next time

Channel: Smart Home Solver

Views: 37,789

Keywords: smart home, home automation, Webcore, webcore smartthings, webcore smartthings examples, webcore tutorial, webcore ifttt, webcore smart app, webcore smartthings dashboard, webcore pistons

Id: 84f0dJTfZO8

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019