I have a Smart Lighting Function that turns off my backyard lights each night at 9:15 each night. It turns off 3 sets of Osram Lights (zigbee) and three Z-Wave Lights.
The Osram lights always give me trouble (I even added a ST Zigbee plug to boost the signal to the Osram devices) meaning I will awake in the morning to find one of the Osram Gardenspots still on.
I have no idea why this is occurring because sometimes it works flawlessly and it is never the same light that refuses to turn off. Oh BTW I have the same trouble when the lights are to come on at sunset each day.
As a workaround I created a second smart lighting app to turn off the lights again at midnight, but this does not solve the problem either as I suspect ST will not turn off a light that ST believes is off (and yes the ST app and the live event both show the command was sent and the light is off).
Question: How can I fix this and/or what is the problem?
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
#2
This is a myth … but, well, not been proven either way.
If any “command()” is sent to a Device Handler, nearly every device handler will execute the command regardless of the State of the Device.
So in theory… if I send command(off) to ‘Backyard Lights’ and the lights are off according to ST, but blazing brightly the command should execute?
That’s great… except the system is behaving unreliably.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
#4
Yes.
The most common complication is that many user-interface controllers (i.e., the native mobile SmartThings App, a Minimote, SharpTools, SmartTiles, etc.) all use “toggle” as their user interaction method; thus, if the controller incorrectly believes the lights are off, it takes at least 2 taps instead of one to get the real lights off.
I actually find controller reliability (i.e., I have to double-press Minimote buttons, like, every day) to be much more annoying than SmartApp issues … well, because I don’t use very many SmartApps at this time because they are so unreliable. Sigh.
I think that Sharptools uses on/off commands in its interface. At least it does for my GE dimmer switches. If a light is off and I press off, the lights stay off (same with on). @joshua_lyon would know better than me.
It provably used to work that way, at least in routines. It would say “X was already in that state.” I had several discussions with support about it. (As well as screenshots last summer.)
It provably no longer works that way.
I’m not sure exactly when it changed, but it has changed, perhaps as part of the Echo integration ( since the previous method ran into synch issues).
When configuring a widget or Tasker action, you have the option to choose what action you want to take. The list defaults to toggle and this is a very reasonable approach for widgets that display state, but you have the option to change this to on, off or use setLevel to dim to a specific level.
For the main SharpTools UI, the commands are broken out into discrete on / off commands for regular switches and include a slider for dimmable devices (as well as other custom ‘cards’ for different device types).
