Ok hear me out. I’m a little curmudgeon on on this but I think I have some valid logic.
Few different issues with the ‘solutions’ suggested. I am a person that works, lives, dabbles, and enjoys technology. I have messed with electronics off and on a bit, from wired to battery powered. And I’d say I’m above average in terms of ‘suaveness’ around tech really. So there’s that.
I fully understand that battery reporting is hard. Just what RBoy said, every battery reports different, has different falloff slopes, and is overall hard. But hear me out, on that point, every device knows what it needs in terms of volts and amps. It can see that, its doing some sort of reporting on that already. Ok maybe its ‘bad form’ to tell people to replace batteries before they are on the last 1%. But they know minimums they need, once you reach a threshold you can say ‘replace me’. You are within 10% of what you need…its going to fail ‘sooner than later’. Maybe that means you still have a month or maybe a day, I’d rather replace before a sensor is dead.
Other side of that is when the battery is dead, and a sensor is ‘gone’ TELL ME. Much like alarm systems that use wireless sensors (most of which are still just zwave anyway), if the sensor is gone, it complains or wont even let you arm it. My leak sensor is gone for a threshold period… once again that word threshold… say its gone for 12 hours, a day, whatever. Tell me, don’t just let it go sitting gone.
On the side of ‘install X app and it does this’. These sorta things should be dang near bare metal. I’ll even go so far as saying the leak sensors I’m complaining about are even ST/Samsung sensors. I try to keep the app experience as stock st/samsung as possible. I’ll admit that Im using Iris sensors for a lot of other things but I do have some ST sensors. But for DTH’s and apps, nope keep it as stock as possible. Ive found my system to be much more reliable that way.
While I groan everytime JD brings up the argument of MTBF of 6 months… I get that already. I honestly couldnt tell you the last time I had a problem with the app or automations. I’ve had 2 ‘failures’ that I can remember… this year. A sengled bulb went uncontrollable, power cycled it and it came back. Then my osram light strip went uncontrollable, this was more difficult, it didnt come back until i went into the thing and ‘edit’ and hit ‘save’ then it came back. By keeping my system as ‘basic’ as possible I’ve honestly had minimal issues. Like so few I cant remember anything but those 2 things since I switched to my v2 hub.
Keeping things ‘basic’ keeps things more intune with what ST seems to have in mind. Like EVERYTHING I have is locally processed as well. I’ve honestly not seen much of an issue with my whole setup in like forever. So much so my monthly or 6 weekly scroll through and look at every ‘thing’ to see if its still connected and updating has dropped off…obv that was a mistake at this point.
But every ST motion sensor has issues with false motion alerts if the battery starts going dead. So much so like obx said, I change those batteries after i get fed up with too many false alerts in SHM… just got one on the way home today. This I fully understand is a hard problem. But the sensor straight up dead for 6 days and I have not been alerted at all…thats a problem
Yes we can try all sorts of apps/hacks/methods… but if we cant even get basic dead sensor reporting to us then whats the point. “Device Health” is on, i actually have little trouble with the bugs many have with it. So why didnt I get a push alert…an email… smoke signal something. Just a little red dot that who knows how long has been that way. I’m 99% sure I had looked at the device sometime this past week but guess not.
CoRE is not the answer to every question. Honestly until it runs locally I will never consider it. And after that, its still kinda meh since i dont ‘need’ that much complication. I’ve lived now like 3ish years with nothing but SmartLighting, SHM, and NotifyMe (lot of the notify stuff used to actually work better in the old dashboard). Same with SimpleDeviceViewer. I set it up once, and man once again typical open source its a sledge hammer to a brass tack. And I’m an open source guy. It just was like too much for being a ‘simple’ device viewer.
Sensors should not just go offline and 0 notification about it without opening the app. let me opt in and set a threshold or something. Device dispears for 2 days tell me via push. This should be core. But im guessing the goal is to have more eyes in the app. Instead of my ideal of my house ‘just working’. Why i dont have tablets in every room with a dashboard, why i dont have echo dots in every room so i can tell my house my every whim. So far ST has somewhat worked…I just get tired of these battery issues that have been around for years and years
