Pausing pistons with RSS feed

#1

1) Give a description of the problem
Based on the Smart things outages this morning, I thought it would be useful to be able to pause pistons via monitoring of the smart things status page. It appears to support RSS feeds. I’m going to try, but I’m absolutely 100% new at coding, and I don’t expect to have much success, and hope that someone might have some ideas. I was just a little put out at the freakout my house was having due to the outage.

2) What is the expected behavior?
RSS feed is monitored using IFTT keword. If the RSS feed indicates an outage, trigger virtual switch, to pause selcted pistons and send a message to home occupants of the outage.

3) What is happening/not happening?
My concern is that if smartthings is having an outage, the virtual switch may not be accessible to trip, so I’m confused wether this would even be possible.

4) Post a Green Snapshot of the pistonimage
(UPLOAD YOUR IMAGE HERE)

5) Attach any logs (From ST IDE and by turning logging level to Full)
(PASTE YOUR LOGS HERE BETWEEN THE MARKS)

REMOVE BELOW AFTER READING

#2

Yea you might be out of luck trying to use SmartThings to alert you of it’s own outage. Since you are using IFTTT to monitor the RSS feeds why not have that send you the message instead and then manually (I know I know it’s supposed to be automated) switch off the pistons that are affected.

You could always still set something up. Just know that it might not work properly.

Create a new piston. Don’t add any conditions. Instead all your statements should be actions. You can pause a piston from another piston. So select all the pistons you want to pause. After saving this on the piston overview page copy the external link to execute. Now when IFTTT sees the outage or whatever. It can send your message to you and execute that url.

In theory the above might work. Just depends on the type of outage I suppose.