Fire tablet setup experience with SmartThings and ActionTiles

I spent quite of time getting my panel (Amazon Fire 7) setup working. I used a Kiosk browser running on the panel, along with ActionTiles to implement the GUI. The programming was done on SmartThings. I setup exit and entrance delays, and automatic turn on/off times. I found it to be quite challenging, and I am an electrical engineer who did a fair amount of programming during my career.

It took me awhile to figure out how the “programming language” presented by SmartThings worked. I’m not sure if there was an easier approach, but effectively I have a number of small state machines running and communicating with each other. I ran into some race conditions, where I had to add extra delays to keep something from changing until after something else changed.

Latency over the internet has also proven to be an issue. Commands from the panel have to talk with ActionTiles (on the internet) and then over to SmartThings (also on the internet) and finally back to the Konnected board. These latencies are likely part of the race condition issues I mentioned above. I have T-mobile home internet, which may have more latency issues than a cable internet connection.

Anyway, I am quite pleased with how my system worked out, but I think most people would be totally unequipped to setup their own panel using the approach I did. Maybe some of the other SmartHome apps might have been more DYI friendly. It sounds like your new approach may make it a lot easier to setup than the approach I used.

Tom

Thomas,

Any way that you can provide a more step by step instructions?

Which aspects are you interested in? The hardware setup or the programming?

The hardware setup was pretty well described by Nate in some of his videos.

I did have a few minor issues with the software setup on the Konnected board, mostly due to the fact that the piezo software was not working initially. But they fixed that.

The Fully Kioski Browser wasnt too bad, just a matter of getting the settings I wanted.

ActionTiles wasnt too difficult to figure out either, the instructions were pretty straight forward.

The hardest part was the SmartThings programming. I did take screen snapshots of the routines and virtual switches I created, but I have tweaked them lately so they are not up to date. I could update them and send to you.

Nate told me the best way to share is on their facebook community, but I havent explored that yet. Does that work for you or should I send to you directly? My email address is tlyunghans@gmail.com.

Tom