I got woken up at 3:50am last night by my bedroom lights turning on to full brightness. Attempts to turn it off via the app just led to a very brief dim and back to bright with the state reverting to “on”.
The really odd thing is that the wall switch didn’t even work. I ended up unscrewing the bulbs.
Checking my event log shows it also turned on at 4:15 (thankfully I removed those bulbs!) dim to 78% at 05:09, back to 99% at 05:11 and then off at 5:14, only to turn back on at 5:15, set to 7%, and turn off.
As far as I can see the bedroom light is the only affected device, everything else seemed to behave. It is working perfectly fine this morning since I put the bulbs back in, control from both the switch on the wall and the app is working fine.
Anyway, my main question is whether there is any way to tell why something has switched on or off? Did the module malfunction and think it saw an “on” signal from the wall switch? Did a Chinese hacker break into my system and decide to command the bedroom light? Did the SmartThings hub just decide it would be really funny to wake me up and mess with me? I seem to have no way to determine what caused an event to trigger - is there a way to find out?
I’m aware that SmartThings has been having a spot of bother (though it claimed to be US only), but seems odd that only one Qubino dimmer out of some 30 odd devices seems to have gone mental… Combined with the inability to turn it off by the switch on the wall I’m wondering if I have a faulty dimmer module?
Yeah I can see the activity, but not what causes it…
For example it says turned on at 3:47am, but there is no way of knowing why that I can see. I want to know if the on state was caused by the module turning itself on (eg like when the manual switch is pressed) or whether the SmartThings hub commanded it to turn on etc… Is there any way in the Logs to find out what caused an event to occur?
Yeah, I often get frustrated by the lack of info in the log. Sometimes the IDE (https://graph.api.smartthings.com/) will provide better info (but only slightly). Go to “My Devices”, click on the device in question then click “List Events”, Under the column source you can at least tell if it was an app/rule that triggered it.
It does say “device” under the source column for the switching on/off events - does that suggest the device is triggering itself?
EDIT - actually scrolling back through the history, it always says device in the source column, even when it would have been triggered by the app (e.g. me turning the lights off last night before bed shows source as “device” despite the command being issued by the app).
after the brief period of working normally this morning It’s gone fully off the wagon now - constantly pulsing on/off. I’ve tried flipping the breaker for upstairs lights to power cycle it, but it goes straight back to pulsing.
Going to see if I can get it to exclude later, then re-add it and see if that fixes the issue. If not I guess it’s some sort of hardware failure because nothing else is acting up.
On the device’s screen in the app, there is a tab for SmartApps which shows the SmartApps linked to the device. I would suspect one of those has gone crazy. In the past day or two I saw post about recent Rule Machine problems…
oddly enough the bedroom lights are actually one of the only devices I have at the moment that aren’t linked to any smart apps…
Even after excluding and re-adding it’s still playing up. Hasn’t entered permanent disco mode yet but looking at the activity log it has since turned on and off uncommanded several times…
Zebra - cheers for that, i’ll leave the live logging open and see if I can catch it next time.
Seems a little co-incidental that the thing would break after working fine for the couple of weeks it has been installed at roughly the same time as the smartthings system has issues, but why would it only be affecting this one device?
EDIT - I’ve had the live logging screen open for an hour and a half and no mis-behaving… typical! It seems to be aware that it’s being watched!
Nothing out of the ordinary as far as I can tell. The light was turned on but no explanation why or how. Assuming there are no Smartapps associated with this device, I am putting my money hardware problem. So much so, I’d be concerned the switch itself is shorting out
With the latest episode of strobing on/off I disconnected the hub and removed the batteries, then power cycled the upstairs light circuit. Even with the hub off, the bedroom lights came back strobing when the power was flicked back on.
If it was a short on the switch, I don’t think you would get this behaviour… If I hold down the switch on other units such as a short would do then it will dim or brighten depending on what stage the light was in when the button was pushed but not turn on/off in a repeating cycle. It would have to be a very regular and repeatable intermittent short occurring in a place where there is no vibration or movement which seems unlikely.
Right, I replaced the module with another I had lying around waiting to be installed elsewhere and it all seems to be behaving for now, will have to give it some time to make sure but so far so good…
I have hooked up the questionable module just to a simple mains plug for power and i’ll leave it running so I can monitor if it has any un-commanded events on the recent events list… if it doesn’t and the lights continue to behave with the new module then i’ll have to scratch my head a bit more!
I would not bet on the hardware problem. I have 1 light out of 65 devices that decides on its own to turn on and off when it sees fit. Last response from support was to delete and readd device. Funny thing is i deleted the device removed it from socket with no plans on readding. Woke up next morning and the light was back in marketplace saying not yet configured. Best bet contact support.
Are you saying that you have both the old module and the new module on power? If you use the Z wave replace utility that can cause a lot of problems unless you excluded The old module before doing the replace.
Or are you saying that it’s the new module that you just have running on power?
I simply renamed the existing device (to “dodgy” ) and plugged it into a mains cable so I could monitor if it still did stupid stuff without a load attached. It did, even going so far as to report a load of 38W at one point.
The new module I added as a new device, and then installed it in the old physical location. No Z-wave replace was used.
) and plugged it into a mains cable so I could monitor if it still did stupid stuff without a load attached. It did, even going so far as to report a load of 38W at one point.