A Smart Home Dashboard is a powerful tool that can help you to make your home more convenient, comfortable, and secure. Whether used in a central location, throughout your home, or even in your pocket - a dashboard provides a central place to control all of your home's devices, get real-time updates on your home's status, and create automations that make your life easier.

Here are some of the benefits of using a Smart Home Dashboard:

Control your home from one central location: A Smart Home Dashboard allows you to control all of your home's devices from one central location, such as your smartphone, tablet, or computer. This can save you time and effort, and it can also make it easier to keep track of what's going on in your home. For example, you could turn on your lights, lock your doors, or adjust your thermostat all from the same place.

Get real-time updates on your home's status: A Smart Home Dashboard can provide you with real-time updates on your home's status, such as the temperature, security, and energy usage. This can help you to save energy, improve your security, and make sure that your home is always comfortable. When combined with a rule engine, you could even receive a notification on your phone if your security system detects any unusual activity.

Run automations that make your life easier: A smart home dashboard can help you run  automations that make your life easier. For example, you could tap a tile on your dashboard that dims your lights to your preferred level, adjusts your thermostat, and checks that the doors are locked. This can save you time and energy, and it can also make your home more secure.

Personalize your Smart Home Dashboard: A Smart Home Dashboard can be personalized to meet your specific needs. You can add widgets for your favorite devices, change the color scheme, and add your own photos and content. This can make your Smart Home Dashboard more enjoyable to use and more useful. For example, you could add a widget for your security system so that you can always see the status of your home's security.

If you're looking for a way to make your home more convenient, comfortable, and secure, then a Smart Home Dashboard is a great option.

Here's a few example dashboards that SharpTools users have shared:

Here are some additional tips for using a Smart Home Dashboard:

• Choose the right devices: When choosing devices for your smart home, make sure that they are compatible with your dashboard.
• Set up your dashboard: Once you have chosen your devices, you need to set up your dashboard. This will involve connecting your devices to your dashboard and creating automations.
• Use your dashboard: Once your dashboard is set up, you can start using it to control your devices and create automations.
• Keep your dashboard up to date: It is important to keep your dashboard up to date with the latest software updates. With SharpTools, your dashboards are automatically kept up-to-date and we're constantly pushing out updates and enhancements so you can enjoy your dashboards worry-free.

I hope this blog post has helped you to learn more about the benefits of using a Smart Home Dashboard. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.

This year was filled with exciting updates for SharpTools - from new platform connections to releasing some of the most popularly requested features, it was a busy year!

Before we get into those details, I want to extend a special thank you to each and every one of you who have provided feedback, suggestions, and helped others in the community! We couldn't have done it without the support of our community members! 🙏

Josh Lyon,
SharpTools Founder

There were several big features released and milestones achieved this year. Some of the highlights include:

• Home Assistant - connection to the popular smart home platform
• Super Tiles - highly customizable tile builder
• Custom Icons - upload your own icons
• Rule Expressions - math and date calculations
• Dashboard Overlays - new way to display other dashboards

And there were even more updates throughout 2022! You can find a full list of feature releases in the following link:

Announcements

Discussion about SharpTools Dashboards, Rule Engine, and Apps

SharpTools Community

The Vision

You might be wondering how all these feature updates fit into the broader vision for SharpTools. Let's start by recalling our mantra which is to make the smart home "simple, but powerful". Each of the feature updates above helps make things easier to use, more functional, or both!

Smart home hubs do a fantastic job handling radio communication with devices and providing a way to interact with those devices, but they often leave us wanting more in terms of visualization, control, and automation... which is why we built SharpTools! Our goal is to provide a 'single pane of glass' to view, control, and automate your smart home.

While we still have a journey ahead of us and lots of opportunity to make things even easier and even better, each of the enhancements noted above have brought us one step closer to that goal.

Community

The beauty of this is we're not alone in this journey! We've been joined by a fantastic community looking to make their smart home 'simple, but powerful'.

The community has been an amazing source of inspiration – showing off their incredible creations along with providing feedback and suggestions. With our formal feature request process, we've been able to get a better understanding of what's most important to the community and this has enabled us to focus on improvements that have the most profound effect on making things better for our users!

I've really enjoyed watching the community grow and evolve. Our staff continue to keep a watchful eye on things and jump into the conversation where appropriate, but it's been a delight to see community members helping each other out and broader, insightful discussions blossom in the community.  

What's next?

While we're busy wrapping up 2022 with the release of Multi-Device Triggers and Conditions as well as Multi-Device Actions, we're already looking forward to 2023!

With SmartThings working toward the sunset of their Groovy platform, we've seen a influx of WebCoRE users and have worked to accommodate those users with advanced features like Expressions and the aforementioned Multi-Device functionality. We'll continue to work on enhancements to the Rule Engine and already have some nice improvements in the pipeline!

We've also had some excellent discussions with the team at Homey, a popular smart home hub in Europe which recently opened pre-orders for their next generation hub that supports the North American market! An integration for Homey quickly became one of the top requested features for SharpTools when the Homey community found out about us, so we're excited to be working with the team at Homey.

And let's not leave out dashboards! We've got some exciting updates planned, but I'll have to leave you in suspense so as not to ruin the surprise! 🤫

As always, we'll keep a close eye on the community, so if you have a specific enhancement in mind that you're looking for, feel free to create a feature request! Thanks again for an amazing 2022!

It's that time of year again in which festive lighting is often used to set the mood for the holidays. In this blog post, we'll cover 5 holiday automations to make your home even more cheerful!

• Sunset and Sunrise Lighting
• Color Scenes from Dashboard
• Turn off lights during rain
• Voice activated lighting
• Kid friendly buttons

Sunset and Sunrise Lighting

Oftentimes, we only want our holiday lighting to be on during the evenings when it's dark enough for holiday lighting to be seen. To that end, we can setup rules that automatically turn on our holiday lighting around sunset and turn it off at sunrise.

A common tweak to this approach is to offset the start and end times so they occur 30 minutes before and after sunset/sunrise... or even to set specific times or days that you want your lighting to be on. SharpTools Rules provide the flexibility to accomplish these various goals.

Color Scenes from Dashboard

Inspired by Ricky_Turner from the SharpTools community, you could setup a dashboard for controlling the various colors or 'scenes'/'modes' from your lighting system. In Ricky's example, his pool lighting controller had a variety of modes that would cycle between various colors to set the mood. He put together a dashboard to enable him to visually select from these various modes or even switch back to a standard color. This same concept applies for many holiday lighting strips or multi color bulbs that are popular during the holidays.

Turn off Lights During Rain

While outdoor holiday lighting is generally fine to exposed to rain as long as it's properly rated and the connections are secure, sometimes you'd like the added assurance of having things turned off while there's moisture outside.

Many hubs expose a weather device and oftentimes these devices expose a 'percent precipitation' attribute that provides the likelihood of precipitation (rain). In that case, you can use the 'chance of rain' to either automatically turn off your lighting or add a condition to prevent the lighting from turning on in the first place.

And even if your hub doesn't expose a weather device, you can always setup a rule to request the weather from a free source like OpenWeather and use that in your rules!

Voice activated lighting

Sometimes the simplest solutions are some of the best! While I love using voice commands with Google Assistant and Alexa for flipping the lamps off when retiring to bed early or turning the TV off when the kids leave it on, it can also be helpful for your holiday lighting!

One neat trick is to use a rule to control all your holiday lighting at once. You could either use a Virtual Switch as your 'master' switch for controlling all of your lighting or you could have one light source act as the 'primary' and have the others follow the lighting status of that primary device.

Kid friendly buttons

Similar to voice activated lighting, sometimes we just want to be able to control things manually - and our kids can join in on the fun with a simple physical button (or dashboard) they can tap to turn on the lights.

To do this, you'll need a button connected to your hub, then you can setup a rule to react to that button being pressed and control the lighting as you see fit. Only want the kids to be able to turn on the lights during a certain time? Add a time condition to restrict when the button press works. Only want them to turn on the lights, but not be able to turn them off? Add only the on command to your rule.

The beauty of this approach is you can customize the logic as you see fit to best suit the needs of your family.

Don't have a physical button? You could always setup a SharpTools Dashboard dedicated to holiday lighting and share just that dashboard with your child or put it on a dedicated tablet for lighting control!

With the sunset of the SmartThings Groovy platform announced, we noticed an influx of webCoRE users arriving in the SharpTools community who brought with them a desire for math functionality and improved date features!

While the feature request for Math with Variables is gaining more votes by the day, we wanted to quickly put something together to help our transitioning webCoRE friends, so we built out some 'labs' features!

Overall Concept

Since we already support HTTP Actions within SharpTools rules, we knew we could quickly build out endpoints on our labs environment and make those available to the community.

The beauty of this is you can pass variables to these endpoints and get data back in the form of context variables. This enables a high degree of customization and flexibility while keeping things relatively simple to use for this experienced demographic.

Math and Formulas

The /math endpoint accepts a single formula parameter that enables you to perform calculations. The beauty of this is you can include variables in the formula enabling you to build dynamic calculations.

In the above example, we're using the well-known temperature conversion formula to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius.

C = (F - 32) * 5/9

We're able to pass our existing $temperature variable into the formula and then can access the result of the formula using a context variable.

Dates and Time

The /date endpoint provides information about the current date and time. You can optionally pass a timezone, locale, and format parameter to further customize the response.

As an example, check out the following URL which shows the current date/time in Phoenix, Arizona along with a custom MMM-D formatted response (eg. Aug-20):

https://lab.sharptools.dev/date?timezone=America/Phoenix&format=MMM-D

You can either use the individual components from the response to build up your string or you can use the format option and get the formatted response in a single go:

Since the response is made available as a variable, you can do things like use it in conditions, notifications, or even pass it forward to the math endpoint for calculations (eg. limit rule to only even weeks).

Furthermore, the endpoint can parse input dates and format those in your localized date / time formats.

By request, we've also added the ability to check if the current date is between two dates. This is particularly helpful for things like holiday lighting or rules that you only want to run during a limited window of days.

When it comes to building rules in the SharpTools Rule Engine, there is a lot flexibility in how you can set things up. And while there's no 'right' way to build a rule, there are some ways to optimize your rules.

These tips focus on how to make your rules run more efficiently and thus, faster.

Redundant Triggers and Conditions

A common anti-pattern we see is when a Trigger and Condition in a rule effectively do the same thing.

In this example, the rule waits for an 'on' event which then triggers the rule flow to run. The first step in the rule flow is to query for the state of the switch to see if it's 'on' – since we already know that the switch is on, the rule is taking unnecessary extra time to query for the state. In this case, the IF Condition could be dropped completely.

But what if your trigger is based on a range of values and you still want to use IF Conditions for various cases? See the next tip on using context variables!

Context Variables

If you want to use information about the event that triggered your rule, Context Variables are your friend. These provide context about the event like the device name, attribute, value and other helpful details.

A common example is using the 'value' from the event that triggered the rule as a condition. Rather than having to query for the state again, the rule can just use the value it already knows about from the 'event context' which saves precious time. When setting up conditions or actions within the flow, you'll find context values under 'Variable' selection.

This means you could use the value that triggered your rule in a condition (for lightning-fast comparison) or you could even include it directly in a notification!

Variables - Snapshotting Conditions

While Context Variables are helpful when you are looking to reference details about an event that triggered your rule, regular Variables can be used for a broad range of use-cases. Variables can be used to store data, can be referenced across multiple rules, and can even be used to trigger or act as conditions with other rules.

A neat way to use variables is to snapshot complex comparisons or calculations and use them across multiple rules. For example, you might have several conditions you like to consider within multiple rules. Rather than having to add the same triggers and same conditions across multiple rules, you could create one rule for evaluating your comparison and saving it to a variable... then you can use that variable in your other rules!

For example, I might create a rule + variable to track when everyone in the house is home. That way in other rules, I can just reference this one simple variable without having to recreate the condition over and over. That also means that if the condition ever changes, I can just change it one place and it will automatically take effect in the other rules that reference the output variable:

Scenes / Routines

If your hub has a concept of groups, scenes, or routines you may be able to use those resources in your rules. When sending multiple sequential commands from a directly from a rule, you might notice some 'popcorn' effect as each light turns on slightly after the previous one.

Using groups/scenes from your hub can be an efficient way to trigger multiple actions all at once.

Even if you hub doesn't natively expose your desired group/scene, you might be able to trigger it using a rule within your native hub interface. A common approach is to expose a Virtual Switch to SharpTools which can be controlled in a SharpTools rule. Your hub can react to that virtual switch changing and run your desired group/scene.

As one of the most popular smart home device types and a common first step in adopting home automation, smart lighting can be a fun and helpful addition to your home. While many home automation enthusiasts start with the convenience of being able to ask your Alexa or Google Assistant to turn the lights on or off, we quickly realize lighting is a prime candidate for being automated! What follows are five essential lighting automations that we frequently see in the home automation communities – but we'd love to hear what automations you use! Share your lighting rules in the comments below!

Sunset and Sunrise Lighting

Our most fundamental circadian rhythm (nih.gov) is driven by changes in light and dark, so it only make sense to consider adapting our lighting to the natural world around us.

There are a few variations to this category, so pick what works best for you – or adapt to your particular needs!

• Automatically dim interior lights on 30 minutes before sunset
• Schedule lights to turn off if they're still on at a certain time
• Run your landscape lighting for the first part of the night – or until sunrise
• Slowly dim bedside lighting to help wake you (or the kids!) in the morning

SharpTools Rule Engine makes it easy to setup Sunset and Sunrise automations with helpful Timer Triggers. These adapt with the changing time of sunset and sunrise in your location and can optionally include an offset to do things like start dimming the lights 30 minutes before sunrise.

Night Lights

There's a few popular approaches that fall into the 'Night Light' category. Whether you like to leave your kid's closet dimmed on all night or you want a light to gently dim on as you get up in the middle of the night, there's an automation for you!

When we had our first baby, I quickly came to realize what people meant about not getting any sleep with a newborn! In order to avoid my wife and I waking each other as we woke up to take care of the baby at night, I setup a small strip of color LED lights under our bed with motion sensors below each side of the bed. If we stepped out of the bed, the automation automatically dimmed the lights to a low red color. (Back to the circadian rhythm item from above, red light doesn't impact your circadian clock (cdc.gov), so it's great for use in night time situations!)

This automation worked great for our needs and we later repurposed the RGB Light strip as fun lighting in my son's room as he grew older!

Motion / Door Lighting

Building on the previous example, motion lighting is a great category of its own! Most smart home hubs provide at least some way of triggering a light to turn on/off whenever motion is detected or a door is opened. If your smart home hub supports running these automations locally, these kind of basic automations are a great fit as timing is everything with motion lighting. (Check out or Popular Smart Home Hubs Compared article for more insights)

And if you need more control over the lighting or want to adjust the lighting and other actions based on multiple conditions, the SharpTools.io Rule Engine has you covered!

Vacation Automation

Another popular lighting automation is vacation lighting - or simulated lighting when you are otherwise not home. The idea is that your lighting can continue to turn on and off as if you were home so a would-be criminal couldn't easily identify your house as being an easy target while you are away.

If you've already setup sunset/sunrise lighting and perhaps have other time-based lighting controlling the lights, that may be enough for you. Some people prefer to take this a step further and further simulate lights being turned on/off during normal 'home' hours as if they are walking between rooms. Using time triggers is certainly a reasonable way of achieving this, but there are other approaches like using Amazon Alexa's free 'Guard' feature which can learn your schedules and use AI to simulate it when you're not home.

Welcome Home

Similar to the Motion Lighting category, another popular category of automations is 'welcome home' lighting. This includes things like having lights turn on/off based on your presence, or your home / garage lighting adjusting as the door opens, or more bespoke things like adjusting your drive way lighting along with your work schedule or presence.

For example, during the winter hours, my driveway is quite dark and it can be difficult to back the car up the driveway – especially where it narrows. I setup a simple automation that turns the lights on around sunset and they automatically turn back off with another automation later in the evening. But if you don't want the lights on quite that long or you'd prefer them to adjust with your changing schedule, you could setup rules based on your geolocation, outdoor motion sensors, your garage door opening, or some other factors or conditions!

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, I'd love to hear what automations you've been using in your home – whether they're lighting automations or something else, let me know in the comments below!

When picking a smart home hub, SmartThings, Hubitat, and Home Assistant are some of the most popular DIY options you'll find on the market. Each hub supports the most common smart home protocols like WiFi, Zigbee, and Z-wave – though some may require additional hardware to accomplish this.

Each platform has it's own unique strengths and weaknesses. The beauty of this is one platform or another might work best for you and your unique needs!

SmartThings

Backed by Samsung, SmartThings is the most widely used consumer smart home platform on the market. Originally released as a Kickstarter project in 2012 and later acquired by Samsung in 2014, SmartThings has evolved into a tremendously popular smart home hub.

SmartThings originally sold their own first-party hub hardware, but more recently they've licensed the technology to third-parties, with Aeotec now producing what is effectively the same hardware as the Samsung SmartThings V3 hub at $125 USD.  

SmartThings has historically combined a mix of local communication along with cloud connectivity. The hub takes care of communicating with the devices on your network and the cloud is where the actual 'brains' reside. More recently, SmartThings has pushed more of the 'brains' into the local hub – with a significant push in 2022 to make devices and automations run directly on the hub where possible. This makes simple, time-sensitive automations like 'lights turning on when motion is detected' run much faster than before while still keeping the power of complex automations available through solutions like SharpTools Rule Engine.

Summary:

• Official support for the most popular smart devices
• Simple user experience in SmartThings app
• Easy device pairing process through the SmartThings app
• Supports Google Assistant, Alexa and Bixby voice control for free
• No additional subscriptions or costs
• Still has cloud dependencies, though there is a push for more local support

What's new:

• Edge device drivers are being rolled out for local automation
• Committed to support Matter, which is the new smart home protocol backed by Google, Amazon, Apple, Samsung (SmartThings) and other vendors aiming to reduce fragmentation in the smart home industry
• Sunset of Groovy devices and SmartApps planned. Time will tell how the community engages with the new tools, but SharpTools has been working closely with SmartThings to migrate to the new APIs.

Hubitat

Built by a number of former contributors in the SmartThings community, Hubitat is a powerful smart home hub offering a commercially available 'off-the-shelf' solution. Hubitat and its community have continued to grow since its debut, with a solid interest amongst the smart home power user community.

Often available for under $120, Hubitat provides a local-focused hub with optional cloud support. This means your devices and 'apps' can run locally directly on the hub, but you can still use services like Alexa and Google Home without requiring an additional fee. Hubitat offers an optional Backup and Hub Protection plan for $29.95/year and Remote Admin for $2.99/month at the time of this article's publishing.

Hubitat's interface is similar to the IDE interface of SmartThings and has been a common hub for SmartThings users to transition to who want a local solution with Groovy support that they are familiar with.

Overview:

• Core features don't depend on the cloud
• Strong community support
• Supports advanced automation creation
• Supports both Google Assistant and Alexa voice control at no cost
• Often enriched with community apps like SharpTools dashboards for a polished interface

What's new:

• Hub Protect + Remote Admin yearly bundle $54.99/year.  (15% saving each year)
• Frequent updates and improvements to hub software based on community feedback (changelog)

Home Assistant

The most popular open-source smart home platform, Home Assistant is a local-focused solution with optional paid ($65/year) or self-managed cloud support. Home Assistant is primarily a software project where you can choose to bring your own hardware or pre-order first-party hardware.

The complete Home Assistant Yellow (first party hardware) is $175 and includes Zigbee but not Z-wave. Most people choose to run Home Assistant on their own hardware and the cost varies depending on the options chosen – when estimating your costs, don't forget to include accessories like cases, power supplies, and Z-wave/Zigbee radios – these small items add up! Perhaps even more interesting, you may already have a computer, NAS, or Raspberry Pi that you can run Home Assistant on!

Overview:

• Exceptionally wide range of devices, protocols, and services supported thanks to open-source contributions
• Supports advanced automation creation with first party automations or popular community solutions like NodeRED or SharpTools Rule Engine
• With local devices, you don't need to worry about cloud device platforms getting shut-down as you run the software locally
• Some things still require tinkering with YAML editing, though the team is working towards introducing more adjustments directly in the UI
• Beholden to the nature of open source software – updates often come quickly, but may need several iterations to stabilize – and community developed integrations may lack consistency with features and design
• Requires additional hardware to support Zigbee/Zwave
• Additional cost or effort for voice control integration

What's new:

• SharpTools Addon introduced April 2022 which offers a more intuitive approach to creating custom smart home dashboards and automation rules
• Home Assistant Yellow hub with Zigbee support coming soon (and includes chip-support for Matter)
• Nabu Casa (Home Assistant Cloud) subscription price changes:
  Introduced yearly plan for $65/yr in US first and other countries to follow. Increased monthly price from $5/mo to $6.50/mo.

Google Home/Amazon Echo

While smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo are great products for voice control and basic smart home needs, we wanted to keep this comparison focused on smart home hubs that provide rich smart home device support and extensibility through community developers.

Each of these voice assistants have excellent cloud-to-cloud device support, but tend to have very limited local protocol support. For example, Google Home primary focuses on cloud connections (with bespoke Bluetooth connections with limited partners like GE) and only some Echo models include limited Zigbee support.

Perhaps more concerning is these platforms tend to be "walled garden" closed ecosystems. They do a fantastic job getting partners to connect devices into their ecosystems, but don't provide APIs for other systems like Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, or SharpTools to interact with those devices – effectively keeping you locked in to their proprietary ecosystem.

Conclusion

Each platform has it's own unique strengths – depending on your smart home needs, you'll likely want to decide what factors are most important to you as you continue your smart home journey.

But fret not, it's totally OK to have a mixed setup with more than one hub – or to transition between hubs as your needs evolve. We're heavily engaged in many of the smart home communities + user groups and frequently see people transitioning between hubs or mixing-and-matching hubs in their home.

For example, SmartThings provides a number of unique cloud integrations that you won't find in other hubs and provides a simple way to get started in the smart home space. Hubitat provides an engaged developer community who have put together some amazing device integrations and 'apps' that work with a fantastic commercially available hub. And Home Assistant has a tremendous depth of available device integrations and is constantly evolving.

Best yet, you can mix-and-match devices from each of these smart home hubs in your SharpTools dashboards and rules as we support all three of these popular smart home hubs!

More and more people are turning to smart home devices to simplify their life, increase their comfort and security, and better enjoy their homes. While there's still a long way to go until smart home technology is widespread in everyone's home, we're seeing smart home devices get adopted by broader audiences every day.

Often times, smart home adoption starts with a single smart thermostat, light bulb, or smart speaker – then over time, we begin to realize the value of mindfully growing our smart home so devices can work together.

Unfortunately, many devices don't talk to each other without some help. Check out the Pick a Platform section of our Smart Lighting article for tips on how to avoid common pitfalls and make sure your devices work together!

As you might surmise from the 'incremental adoption' approach mentioned above, some of the most popular smart home devices include:

• Lights
• Thermostats / Radiators
• Outlets
• Locks
• Smart Speakers
• Other: Smart TV, Camera, Doorbell

Thermostats from companies like Nest, Ecobee, and Honeywell are popular in the US while brands like Netatmo, Tado, Hive, and Drayton fill in the gap in Europe. Some devices provide the ability to 'learn' your schedule and adjust your heating and cooling accordingly – while a common feature is enabling manual adjustment of your thermostat while away or from your voice assistant.  

When it comes to lighting, there's a wide variety of choices in a mix of segments from traditional lighting, color temperature controlled, and even color controlled (RGB). Many names from the color market – like Philips Hue, LIFX, and Nanoleaf – may even be familiar to you as it was one of the first broadly marketed consumer lighting product groups. Mainstay brands like GE and Lutron continue to strongly position themselves in the market and less mainstream brands like Sengled, Inovelli, and Zooz are a popular choice in the DIY smart lighting space.

We've also seen the evolution of brands that are more traditionally known in other technology spaces move into the smart home space. For example, Belkin has their Wemo brand which is particularly popular for its smart outlets, and companies like TP-Link which are more commonly known for their networking products have popular lines of smart outlets, bulbs and more.

Looking for insights on smart lighting and smart outlets? Check out our Five Things to Consider with Smart Lighting article.

Early on, the smart lock space was dominated by companies like August which provided locks that communicate directly with your smart phone using Bluetooth. Over time, these devices evolved to a broader range of communication protocols enabling to you control them while away from your home. Traditional brands like Kwikset, Schlage, and Yale remain key players in the smart lock space and provide excellent products. Meanwhile, brands like Wyze, Eufy, and even August are trying to bring smart locks mainstream with competitive prices and features.

Some of the most well-known and widely adopted smart devices are Smart Speakers. For a while there, it felt like every company had their own voice assistant from Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, Samsung's Bixby, Google's Assistant, and Apple's Siri. Many of these voice assistant's evolved from their position as software on your PC or Phone into dedicated smart speaker hardware – with Amazon Echo speakers and Google Assistant powered speakers being some of the most popular and Apple's HomePod gaining traction amongst Apple die-hard fans.

Cameras and doorbells are also a popular category of smart home devices. While brands like Nest, Ring, and Arlo dominate this space, it's still a bit nascent and evolving category where many brands still lock you into their ecosystem. It's probably a whole topic of it's own with companies like Apple doing great things to standardize video access with HomeKit while still not quite hitting the mark and still locking you into their ecosystem. There's still a variety of traditional 'IP Cameras' available on the market that provide video over standards like RTSP and ONVIF, but these standards still haven't caught up to the modern Internet of Things with simple external access to your cameras. Standards like WebRTC and HLS Streaming show promise for alleviating some pain, but that story is yet to be written.

There's also a wide-variety of other smart home devices out there including a variety of sensors (motion, temperature, contact, presence, flood), smart buttons, smart displays and more. Some of these devices use special wireless radios like Zigbee/Z-wave or otherwise operate independently from other devices. As such, it's important to think about the big-picture of what your smart home will look like and pick a platform which supports a wide range of devices. Best of all, SharpTools supports these devices through our partner smart home hubs like SmartThings, Hubitat, and Home Assistant!

In the same spirit as our Custom Tiles post, I wanted to share a bit of background on how Super Tiles came to be and the neat things they can be used for.

Super Tiles are a feature – unique to SharpTools dashboards – that enable you to mix and match thing attributes, variables, and icons in a dashboard tile using a drag-and-drop editor.

Background

When building SharpTools, our vision was to make it easy for anyone to add items to a dashboard and quickly customize things as they see fit. In support of this goal, when you add a Thing to a dashboard, it automatically uses a layout that best fits the primary capability of the Thing. Most of the time, this makes it quick and easy to add items to a dashboard and build a nice-looking, customized interface.

In some cases, the default tile layouts don't fit your needs – for example, you might have a Thing with custom attributes that you'd like to display. The Hero Attribute tile was built to meet this need – enabling you to display any attribute from any device (and optionally a secondary attribute in the footer).

But in some cases, you want to display several attributes from a device or even mix-and-match data from multiple devices or variables into a single tile – hence the birth of the Super Tile.  

Examples

Multiple Attributes in One Tile

Sometimes want to bring data from multiple attributes into a single tile. For example, maybe we have several different sensors related to something we are monitoring, like charging a Tesla.

Multiple Devices in One Tile

In other cases, we might want to have the same type of data from multiple different devices. The goal here might be to quickly get an overview of all the locks or lights in a home for a example – quickly being able to see the outliers.

Navigation Menu

In addition to displaying data from Things or Variables, you can also use labels and hyperlinks in Super Tiles. Combining these two things, we can create a basic navigation tile that we can reuse across multiple dashboards. This is the same concept used in the header image of this blog post if you want to see it in action!

Room Aggregation

Another popular use-case for Super Tiles involves aggregating the status of a room in a single tile. A common approach uses a rule to aggregate the status of multiple lights into a true/false variable and then layering that in with other data like temperature and humidity from the room. The unique thing here is we're bringing together variables, things, and rules all into one tile.

In this post, we cover five different garage automations that can help automate your life and help you feel more secure!

This post is inspired by tweets and TikToks from Jimmy of SmartThings Beat and Automated House. Follow his accounts for more smart home content!

Many of the original inspirations for these automations involve automatically closing your garage door, but if you don't feel comfortable doing that, a common alternative is to a send a notification to your phone to remind you to close the door.

1. Automatically Close After X Minutes

If you're anything like me, at some point you'll find yourself driving to a destination wondering if you remembered to close the garage door. One approach to help with this is to setup a rule to automatically close your garage door after being open for X minutes.  

2. Conditions Like Weather

Perhaps you prefer to keep your garage door open, so automatically closing it after a period of time doesn't suit your lifestyle. There may still be cases where you don't want your garage door left open – for example if it starts raining.

There's a variety of different smart devices that can help, but many smart home platforms also have weather integrations that can help here. Feel free to post in our community if you're looking for help!

In our case, we're using Percent Precipitation (aka. "Chance of Rain") as the trigger for our rule. If the chance of rain goes above 70%, the rule checks if the garage door is open and only sends us a notification if it is.

3. Left Open after a Specific Time

In my home, I have notifications sent to me when I leave my garage door open, but I don't have it automatically close. That leaves the chance for me to ignore a notification, so I have another rule that runs every evening at 9 PM and checks if all the doors are locked and the garage doors are closed and sends me a notification if anything is not secured.

In this case, we're using time as the trigger for when the rule should run and again we have an If Condition that checks if the garage is open to determine if it should send the notification.

4. When Everyone Leaves

If your primary concern is around leaving your garage door open when you're not home, you could use presence as a key factor in determining when your rule should run.

There's a variety of  'Things' that can be used for determining if you're home or not. One of the more common solutions is to use your smart phone as a presence indication. In that case, you might consider using a 'state stays' trigger as shown in the screenshot above as phones will sometimes briefly think they've left the zone.

The community has also come up with a variety of neat alternatives for determining presence including connectivity to wifi, physical arrival sensors (fobs), and more.

5. Open Garage Upon Arrival

You could also create a rule to open the garage upon your arrival, though it's a contentious point of debate in smart home discussions.

Presence sensors and even arrival sensors aren't always 100% accurate, so I generally recommend against automatically opening your garage door.

For this type of solution, it's strongly recommended to use a dedicated hardware presence sensor and/or multiple factors in determining presence. You can also add conditions to your rule to only allow it very limited cases - for example, during a short targeted window when you commonly arrive home.

In feature-rich automation builders, like the SharpTools.io Rule Engine, you can have other rules which create 'flags' to determine if certain rules are allowed to proceed. For example, if you have a 30 minute commute from work you might have a rule which sets a variable to 'true' 25 minutes after departing your office and then back to 'false' after 35 minutes. Then in your arrival rule, you could check if that variable was set to 'true' to determine if the rule should be allowed to open the garage.

A 'Smart Home' is more than controlling the lights from your phone, adjusting the thermostat temperature while away from home, or hanging out on the couch yelling commands to a voice assistant. It's automation that truly makes a 'smart home' smart! Here are 5 essential automation ideas you can use to level up your smart home.

Before We Start

It's important to know some basics about smart home automation:

Smart Home Platforms Connect Devices

A platform, which can be a hub or cloud service, enables devices to communicate and interact with each other. For example, for the automation turn on a light when motion is detected, the platform must be able to receive the motion event from the motion sensor and be able to control the light switch to achieve the goal.

If you haven't connected your smart devices to a platform, or need some guidance for picking a smart home platform, check out the Pick A Platform section of our 5 Things to Consider with Smart Lighting post.

Event Driven or Time Schedule

In order for an automation to run, it needs to get kicked off, or 'triggered' somehow. It could be simple as time schedule, such as turning lights on every morning at 7am. Or it can based on an event, like sending a notification when a motion is detected. Before you start to work on a new automation, it is important to think about how the automation should be triggered.

3rd Party Automation Builders

Many platforms offer built-in automation features, but these can sometimes be limited in functionality or flexibility. Here are some popular 3rd party automation builder integrations that you may consider:

• webCoRE
  A community developed automation builder for SmartThings. It offers a lot of capabilities and functionality with a coding-like interface which may take a while for the average user to grow accustom to.
• IFTTT
  Easy to use with lots of service and device connections, IFTTT allows simple automation creation, but the latency with some integrations might not be ideal for real-time automations. The paid Pro tier is required for creating more than 3 applets (automation rules) and multi-step applets. Ex: Pro tier is required if you want to send a notification and turn on a light in the same time when the motion is detected.
• SharpTools
  Powerful but easy to use visual flow builder interface. You can create complex automation logic in an easy interface. Unlimited rules included for free – some advanced features, such as variables, may require a premium license.

SharpTools Premium also enables unlimited dashboards and other premium dashboard features.

Notify When Doors Left Open

Security Enhancement

If you're like me, it isn't uncommon to wake up in the morning and find out the garage door was left open the whole night or to come home and realize someone forgot to close the door. This is one of the most popular security enhancement automation that we have seen. Sending an email, SMS, or other type of notifications when the door or garage door has been left open for 15 minutes surely gives you the piece of mind that you need.

Motion Triggered Lighting During the Night

Security Enhancement · Comfort and Convenience

Having a light automatically turn on during the night when motion is detected not only provides safety benefits but can also provide a warm welcome to your guests. This is also a popular automation for stairways, patios, pantries and more. You can optionally change the brightness of the light depending on the time of the day when the motion is detected, for example if you don't want it to fully brighten when waking up in the middle of the night. Another common addition is to automatically turn the lights back off after motion been inactive for 5 minutes to save energy and money.

Interested in learning more about SharpTools Rule Engine? Check out the Rule Engine Overview and create your free automation rules now!

Water Leak Notification

Money Saving

One of the worst things to experience is finding a busted water pipe and the serious damage it can do to a home. Many of us have been there and repairing water damage is never cheap. A water sensor usually cost less than $25 dollars in most countries but can save thousands of $$ if the leakage is detected and handled timely. Water heaters, sinks, washers, and refrigerators are common locations to place water sensors so you can receive an email, SMS or other types of notifications when a leak is detected.

Good Morning Routine Everyday at 7am

Comfort and Convenience

Get woken up by gently increasing light or music and start your day off right! Many smart home enthusiasts take advantage of their Hue bulbs and Sonos or Echo speakers to create automations that gradually set the light or volume level up over 15 minutes (fading) every day for a gentle wake up instead of a harsh abrupt change. 'Wake up' automations can also include changing the light color from a cold to warm color gradually, turning on the TV for morning news, starting the coffee brewing, and more. With a flexible automation builder, you can even have the automation play different music or take other actions conditionally depending on the day of the week.

Welcome Home Routine When Arriving Home

Comfort and Convenience

Many smart home platforms support geolocation from mobile devices which enables many creative automation ideas. Turning lights on, starting your favorite music on Sonos, and adjusting the thermostat temperature based on the geolocation or presence events are all popular automations. Conditions around the time of the day or day of the week can also be helpful additions to arrival and presence automations – for example triggering different weekday vs weekend actions.

Conclusion

Automation is an essential part of the 'smart home' that will evolve alongside your automation needs and creativity as you continue your smart home journey. It is important to select an automation builder that is flexible and powerful to meet your needs while also being easy to use and manage.

What is your favorite or most creative home automation setup? Leave your comments below and share your creative automation ideas.

So you're adding 'smart' devices to your home and wondering what things you should consider as you purchase or add these devices? In this article, we'll describe 5 things to consider when starting your smart home journey or continuing on the path as you grow your smart home.

Device Compatibility

One of the most common pieces of advice we see from experienced smart home enthusiasts is to choose a platform that you'll connect your devices to. Many people's journey starts by picking up a single smart device – like a smart thermostat or smart plug – then later adding on additional smart devices piece by piece. If you're not careful, before you know it you have several different apps you have to open to control your smart devices and they don't talk with each other.

This is why choosing a platform which supports the devices and brands that you like is an important step in the smart home journey. Many experienced smart home enthusiasts would recommend a hub like SmartThings or Hubitat that includes support for cloud devices, wifi devices, and smart home protocols like Zigbee / Z-wave.

If you're not familiar with what all this means, don't fret! Check out the Hub or Hubless section of our Smart Lighting post.

While cloud and wifi devices might be a familiar concept, Zigbee and Z-wave may be unfamiliar terms for someone new to the smart home space. These are wireless protocols (kind of like Wi-Fi) purposely built for the smart home. There's tons of smart home devices that work with these protocols, they follow documented standards so you don't get locked into a vendor's proprietary app, and you can use a hub like SmartThings or Hubitat so devices from different protocols can all work together well!

3rd Party Integrations

When starting your smart home journey, it's often cool enough just to be able to remotely control a light or thermostat from an app. Over time though, you'll likely find yourself looking at how other apps and integrations can work with your smart home.

Common integrations include voice assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, dashboards and rule builders like SharpTools, or even purpose-built community 'apps' for enriching your smart home.

If these integrations are important to you, make sure to pick a device or platform that works with these integrations. Hubs like SmartThings and Hubitat mentioned above provide an ecosystem of integrations and a platform for third-parties to build upon which can further enrich your smart home experience.

Ease of Use

If a product is difficult to use or leads to frustration, you'll likely stop using it. This is why 'ease of use' is a critical consideration when picking smart home products.

Some of this comes down to the platform that you ultimately end up picking. If you just use one or two smart home devices from the same manufacturer, then you might use the manufacturer's app. If you have several devices from multiple manufacturers, you'll likely bring them together either in a voice assistant (Google/Alexa), in a hub (SmartThings/Hubitat), or in a dashboard (SharpTools).

Beyond the app, some physical smart home devices might have ways to physically interact with them. For example, something as simple as a light switch can have different qualities for user experience. Most light switch manufacturers know that people are used to flipping a traditional toggle or decora light switch on and off and design around that. But some manufacturers, like Lutron, take a unique approach with adding additional buttons and features to their devices.

Much of this comes down to user preference, but you can get a feel for common praises and criticisms by checking app store reviews and product reviews on retailer websites (eg. Amazon).

Support and Updates

Often overlooked until you have a product in-hand and have an issue, support can be a critical part of the product experience. 'Support' can be a broad category of things, but we're generally referring to getting help with the product, platform, or device.

That includes both official support channels as well as community support. For the latter, you can often check if there's a community or forum hosted by the company and take a look through the discussions to see how things are handled. To be fair, some of the discussion is driven by the community itself, but in strong communities you'll also find staff chiming in and helping out.

If you have any questions before you buy a product or service, it's a great chance to reach out through the official support channels and get a feel for the quality of support you'll receive. Some companies, like Zooz, get rave reviews for their support. With other companies, you might find yourself directed to a knowledge base or their community. And that's not to downplay community support as it can sometimes be tremendously helpful – just something to consider based on your preference for support!

Updates are also a critical part of many smart home devices. This tends to be more of a consideration with platforms, integrations, and select device types. For platforms and integrations, it's important that they continue to get updated to stay with the times, add new features, and integrate with more devices (or existing devices as they change).

Automation Capabilities

As alluded to in the '3rd Party Integrations' section, it's often just fun to be able to flip a light on from your phone when you're first getting started, but over time you'll likely want to start automating things.

Take for example, lights, where you might want to have a light automatically turn on based on sunrise/sunset or even based on another device – like dimming the lighting on when motion is detected. These scenarios are typically accomplished through automations or 'rules'.

Your device manufacturer or smart home hub might have some level of automation features built-in. If you stick within a device ecosystem you'll usually get at least a basic set of 'If A, then do B' type of rules for devices from the same manufacturer. If you've opted for a smart home hub, you'll generally get a slightly more capable rule system that can interact between devices.  

You might outgrow the capabilities built-into your system, and this is where having the ability to use third party integrations can really help – for example, SharpTools provides a robust set of functionality in an easy-to-use interface that enables you to easily create powerful automations.

When looking at smart lighting options, there's a vast array of choices – and some of these choices may be fraught with pitfalls! We'll cover the top 5 things to consider when choosing a smart lighting option for your home!

Bulb, Switch, or Plug?

One of the first things to think about is the form factor you choose for your smart lighting. You can choose to use smart light bulbs, a smart light switch, or even a smart plug / outlet.

Smart Bulb

The smart bulb is perhaps the most immediately obvious form factor, but there's various pros and cons to this choice! Smart bulbs are easy to install, come with a variety of features, and are widely available. Smart bulbs are also available in a wide variety of connectivity options from Bluetooth to Wifi to Hub Connected. There's some key considerations with respect to compatibility, so be sure to check out the 'Pick a Platform' section below!

Bulbs are a great choice for areas where changing out light switches would be challenging (like an apartment) and for one-off lighting areas like lamps. For areas of your home that have several bulbs - like a room with multiple lights, a multi-bulb lamp, or even a chandelier smart bulbs can get expensive and may create challenges for control. For these areas, it might be worth considering a smart switch or smart plug.

Smart Switch

Whereas with Smart Bulbs you replace each of the individual bulbs, with the smart switch you replace the light switch itself. This has some neat benefits like being able to control (or even dim) multiple lights all at once. It also retains the benefit of being immediately intuitive how to control the lights - just walk in and flip the switch as normal.

While we're on the point of flipping switches – this form factor also solves one of the critical issues with smart bulbs – if the light switch is turned off, you can no longer control your smart bulbs. So if you go the smart bulb route, you either need to retrain your family not to turn the switch off or come up with a creative alternative.

When choosing smart switches that use common smart home protocols (like Z-wave and Zigbee), smart switches also have the benefit of making your mesh stronger which means all the other smart devices you add (and you know you'll end up adding more!) will benefit from improved signal and range throughout your home.

Smart switches require more effort to install than bulbs since you can't just twist them in, but if you plan on continuing to grow your smart home, they're a worthy investment in effort!

Smart Plug

While the smart bulbs get the benefit of a simple installation and the smart switches get the benefit of controlling multiple bulbs at once, the smart plug gets the best of both in certain scenarios. As the name suggests, smart plugs get plugged into an existing outlet and make the devices it controls 'smart'.

If you're looking to control a lamp, table top fan, or other plug-in style devices, this could be the right choice for you. As long as the device you connect to your smart plug turns on when power is supplied to it, the smart plug makes for a great choice.

Smart Plugs retain some of the benefits of Smart Switches in that they can extend the mesh for other smart home devices (Z-wave and Zigbee) providing more range and better signal as you add more devices. They're also simple to install like a smart bulb, but suffer from a similar problem as smart bulbs – if someone manually turns the lamp off via it's physical controls, the smart plug won't be able to turn it back on. So consider your family's usage – as families become more accustom to voice control and automations, this tends to be less of a problem for devices like floor lamps, but might still plague you with devices like table lamps where old habits of physically turning things off might be hard to change.

If your switch or plug is dimmable, make sure your bulbs are too! As many manufacturers have started switching to production of LED bulbs in place of traditional incandescent or halogen bulbs, they've started producing two lines of bulbs – one line that only supports on/off and another line that also supports dimming.

Pick a Platform

When it comes to building a smart home, one of the most common issues we see is having a selection of devices that don't work well together. It might start by picking up a smart thermostat... which gives you the itch to get some cool smart bulbs... then before you know it you have 10 different apps you have to open to control these devices and none of them talk to each other!

Many experienced smart home enthusiasts consider 'picking a platform' one of the most critical steps in the smart home experience. This gives you the benefit of making sure your devices can all be controlled together, used in automations together, and otherwise just work well together.

There's two primary approaches that come to mind with 'platforms':

• Smart Home Hubs
  These are platforms like SmartThings, Hubitat, or even Home Assistant which bring all your devices together and provide connectivity options
• Voice Assistants
  Modern voice assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa provide some benefits of a hub-like experience to bring cloud-connected devices together

Hub or Hubless

Smart home hubs like SmartThings and Hubitat bring devices from varying manufacturers and wireless protocols all together in a single device and interface. We briefly mentioned the idea of dedicated home automation protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave earlier in this article – having support for these protocols in your smart home hub is essential if you plan to grow your smart home. Hubs from SmartThings (Aeotec) and Hubitat (direct) have native support for Zigbee and Z-wave along with other protocols like wifi/networked devices.

That being said, there are many bulbs available on the market which connect via wifi. Wifi chips have become dirt-cheap (like 25¢), make it easy for device manufacturers to control the end-to-end experience, and make setup a breeze with no dependencies on an external hub. But, and there's a big "but", there's no standards for these devices which means each wifi smart device manufacturer gets to create their own way for communicating with their devices. More often than not, this lack of standards mean you're tied into whatever app and integrations the manufacturer provides (and if the manufacturer drops support for these integrations, there's often nothing you can do).

That's why in most cases, I would recommend taking the extra effort of getting a Z-wave or Zigbee compatible device and a supporting hub. Smart lighting is like a gateway drug to the broader home automation space and having a hub that can support you as you look to add new devices is well worth the investment.  

Best yet, smart home hubs like SmartThings and Hubitat provide the ability to connect additional apps and services together. So you can do neat things like create a beautiful SharpTools dashboard to control your smart devices or use the SharpTools Rule Engine to create automations.

Voice Assistants

If you were to ask your average person which platform they wanted their smart lights to connect to, you'd most likely get an answer of Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Apple's Siri. And for good reason - voice assistants have become an integral part of most people's smart home.

It's often convenient to be able to simply ask your voice assistant to turn off the lights or adjust the thermostat. And companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple are absolutely dominant forces in the market. But all of those systems are 'walled garden' or closed ecosystems – meaning they make it easy for developers to integrate their devices into the voice assistant (further adding value to the voice platform), but difficult to use the broad assortment of devices in other platforms.

While it's important to consider which voice assistants you want to use in your home, I would still recommend picking a proper smart home hub to connect all your devices to - then all you have to worry about is connecting your smart home hub to your voice assistant.

White, Color, or Color Temperature

When it comes to smart lighting, there's a variety of choices when it comes to 'color'. And I don't just mean red, green, blue and that sort of thing... but white and the different shades of white – color temperature.

When choosing an 'RGB' (Red, Green, Blue) lighting option, you'll find that there's a variety of color ranges that are available. This isn't like a computer monitor or TV screen where perfect color accuracy is important for most people. Most modern, well-known lighting brands will have an acceptable color range and accuracy. That being said, different devices will have different color capabilities so if you are going to be choosing multiple devices for room, you likely want the colors to match across those devices. Well known brands in this space include Philips Hue, Nanoleaf, Sengled, and Sylvania – the last two offering Zigbee options that work well with smart hubs.

When it comes to white lighting, you generally have the choice of either a fixed color temperature (Kelvin) or adjustable color temperature. Like RGB lighting, you'll generally want the color temperature of your devices to match. Otherwise you'll end up with some lights that are bright cool bluish tint and others that are a warm reddish tint. To that end, take a look at the various color temperature options and make sure you are choosing one that fits your personal aesthetic – the traditional 'warm white' is usually in the range of 2700K-3000K – anything lower is redder and anything higher is whiter and tends toward blue.

Also note that some people enjoy the ability to adjust the color temperature of lighting in their house. There's even a natural connection between the color temperature of natural lighting associated with the natural circadian rhythm – your natural sleep / wake clock.

Automation

One of the neat features of smart lighting is the ability to automate things. Two of the most popular automations involve convenience based automations and security automations.

With convenience based automations, we look at ways that we can leverage smart lighting to make our lives either. For example, having lights automatically turn on and off on a schedule (either a fixed time or relative to sunset/sunrise), or having lights automatically turn on when a door is opened or someone enters a room. The ability to have lighting triggered based on other conditions, like motion, is yet another reason we recommend you 'pick a platform' to ensure your devices can talk to each other.

For security based automations, examples often include things like vacation lighting that simulates activity in a home or lighting that's triggered based on events like motion being detected. Take a simple example of a driveway floodlight – these commonly are offered with a motion sensor built-into the them, but are restricted to whatever visibility the built-in motion sensor has. With smart lighting, you can add a motion sensor wherever you like and connect it with whatever lighting device you like. So if you want to have motion sensors at the far end of a driveway or around a corner, you have that option. Or if you want interior lights to automatically come on, you have that option too!

Looking to build automations for your smart home? Check out the free SharpTools Rule Engine!

Extra Features

There's a seemingly endless number of 'extra' features that are available in smart lighting which we'll only briefly cover here. One of the most common features of smart lighting is 'groups' – or the ability to control multiple devices together. This can either be something that's natively provided by the device, like in the case of Philips Hue, or something that's enabled through automations on your smart home hub or a Rule Engine like SharpTools.

Some devices even have special integrations with things like your TV or music. For example, Philips Hue offers special hardware that can 'see' what your TV is displaying and match the lighting to the content on the screen. Similarly, there's options to having your lighting 'dance' to the beat of your music.

While most people think of traditional light bulbs, lighting is now available in a variety of form factors like light strips, ropes, and even panels like those shown in the image above. If you're looking for a cool way to spice up a room, be sure to take a look at other form factors.

From knowing if you should grab a jacket before you head out to getting notified if the windows were left open and it's going to rain, there's a ton of great use cases for integrating weather into your smart home experience.

There's a lot of interest in how to use weather in the smart home – as of the time this article was written, the all-time top 'trending search term' on the SharpTools Community is 'weather'!

There's two primary ways that we tend to see people use weather in their smart home:

• Visual reference in dashboards or apps
• Automations / rules based on weather

Dashboards and Apps

When it comes to dashboards and apps, the primary use case it to be able to quickly glance at the screen and get feel for the weather. As alluded in the intro, it can be helpful to see a weather summary and know if you need to grab a jacket, grab an umbrella, or maybe even swap out pants for shorts!

To this end, most people are looking for a quick visual indication of the weather status along with the temperature. Platforms like Hubitat and SmartThings have native support for weather providers – with SmartThings providing it out of the box and it only being a few clicks away in Hubitat.

As shown in the screenshot above, SharpTools dashboards have native support for displaying weather data from SmartThings or Hubitat. You can glance at at the tile and just from the icon and temperature alone can get a feel for the weather. If it's rainy, snowing, overcast, or one of many other conditions, the icon visually depicts the status and you can always take a closer look at the tile details to better understand the conditions. Similarly, the temperature is front-and-center in a large font making it easy to get a feel for the temperature outside.

Media and Custom Tiles

Another common approach with dashboards is to use Media Tiles to display a weather radar or 5-day forecast from your favorite weather/news resource. This provides a ton of flexibility and gives you the added benefit of being able to see what the upcoming weather is like (or otherwise just feel like a cool weatherman with your fancy radar).

In addition to media tiles, another neat approach is to leverage Custom Tiles. For example, Michael, one of our amazing community members put together a neat collection of custom weather 'widgets' which you can find in his community post. These provide a variety of different ways to visualize weather information from a forecast tile, to readable summary, a visual weather background and more!

Automations and Rules

Another popular use of weather is within automations. Weather can be used to trigger rules, as a condition within a rule, or even as a basic notification. We've summarized a handful of neat automation concepts we've seen below:

• If the windows are open and it starts raining, send a notification
• Send a push notification every morning with the weather summary
• Adjust the thermostat if the weather is hotter or colder than normal
• If the outside temperature rises and the windows are open, send a notification

For the SharpTools Rule Engine, these concepts translate to what we call Rule Triggers, If Conditions, and Actions. For example, here's a trigger that would kick off a rule whenever the temperature was above a certain value:

Then within the 'flow' of the rule, we might have a condition to check if the windows are open and then send a notification telling us to close them if they are.

How do you like to use weather in your smart home? Or what ways would you like to see weather further integrated with your smart home? Let us know in the comments!

A solution that enables external integrations to seamlessly blend into dashboards. That's what we set out to build with the Custom Tiles feature.

As you might suspect, we frequently receive requests to integrate new devices and services into the SharpTools smart home platform. While we currently support thousands of smart home devices and services by proxy of our hub partners – Hubitat and SmartThings – there's always going to be some esoteric device that someone is interested in.

To that end, we built Custom Tiles as a way for community developers to build dashboard tiles that can display data from and interact with third party services.

Interested in learning more about SharpTools dashboards? Learn more on our website or get started with your free account!

Key Priorities

As we set out to build Custom Tiles, a number of priorities were kept in mind:

• Easy to develop (including sample code, documentation)
• Ability to integrate with third party APIs
• Ability to build custom interfaces
• Ability to use standard technology (no custom framework required)
• Must provide a secure / sandboxed approach for integration
• To share or not to share?

Since SharpTools itself is a modern web application, it was only logical to extend that to the Custom Tiles. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility to achieve the above stated goals. It enables developers to use technology that they are either already familiar with or can quickly get up to speed with.

The most basic approach is to use the URL option which effectively just embeds the desired website directly in a tile. The next level up is to use the HTML option wherein developers get full control of the tile.

With HTML, developers can start with the basics or layer in modern web frameworks like Bootstrap, Angular, Vue, React, vanilla JavaScript or even just HTML! This also has the added benefit of providing a wealth of educational material for learning!

Browsers provide a rich set of tools for communicating with APIs – one of our favorite libraries, axios, provides a beautiful wrapper for the underlying HTTP Request functionality in a browser. And while we were able to leverage some of the native sandboxing features of modern browser, we're also able to provide our own stio Library for enriching the developer experience.

To Share or Not to Share

That brings us to the last point on the list which is sharing. We went back and forth on this during internal discussions. Platforms like SmartThings, Hubitat, Home Assistant and others have all been tremendously enriched by the contributions of their community.

We knew that we couldn't realistically review and approve all custom code that users wanted to share. Our friends at SmartThings attempted something akin to this in their early days before realizing that it wasn't sustainable and the community had naturally began to share community projects outside of the main approval channel.

Learning from the experience of those that have come before us, we realized that providing basic tooling for importing community code and leaving it in the hands of the community was the right first step. This comes with the natural caveat that you shouldn't trust code from unknown sources and an appropriate warning during the import process that reiterates this.

What's next?

Documentation

We put together a brand new documentation site dedicated to developers and Custom Tiles. Whether you are looking for an overview of what Custom Tiles are or want an API Reference for the stio Library, it's all there.

Custom Tiles | SharpTools Docs

SharpTools developer documentation site

SharpTools Docs

Examples

The community has starting putting together a neat assortment of custom tiles – from things like gauges and trends, custom weather displays, maps and more! You'll also find a number of custom tiles that we've put together a number of custom tiles which can be used as a reference as well.

Community Projects

A place for SharpTools community members to share their cool projects. The perfect place to share your <a href=“https://docs.sharptools.io/developer-tools/custom-tiles/”>Custom Tiles</a>.

SharpTools Community