I have a Samsung-branded multisensor in use as a tilt sensor on a door. It faulted to an open state early this morning when the door hadn’t moved. A few hours ago I noticed that it was still sending temperature and vibration updates, but didn’t respond to real inputs (moving the door, creating actual vibrations). So I pulled it, removed the battery and spent a couple hours doing other stuff. Just now I reinstalled the battery, and checked to see if it was responding in the app. It wasn’t, but I noticed the app showed temperature, vibration and tilt messages occasionally received while there was no battery in the device!
The device has worked fine for several years, no hint of issues. I’m not just confusing it with another device as it’s clearly named and I don’t have another Smartthings sensor on that door.
Anyone have any idea how I could possible be seeing messages from a sensor that couldn’t possibly send any!?
Some follow up here… I found several other sensors that were not responding correctly. Interestingly, they were all Samsung branded contact sensors. All the sensors from other brands seemed to be working fine. The Samsung sensors were reporting temperatures, but completely failing to report open/closed status. But since no error was shown, there was no way to know those sensors were blind.
I rebooted the hub and that seemed to have fixed things.
However, this is a completely unacceptable failure mode. If you aren’t home, how do you reboot it? Since it can just make up fake messages, how do you know what’s real?
If anyone has any insight, I’d love to learn more about what happened here. Hard to ever trust Smartthings again if something like this can just randomly happen!
The Samsung sensors are only about four years old. Pretty sure they’re the same as the ones Aeotec still sells now. My Lowe’s Iris sensors which really are 10 years old worked fine.
(Edit: To clarify, all the Samsung sensors worked fine again after the reboot. I only bring it up in case it helps explain why the system/hub might have failed this way.)
Well the events that result in attribute changes are entirely in the gift of whatever is handling the device integration. In your case that will probably be an Edge driver or the Lua libraries, though increasingly things can be handled at lower levels in the hub firmware. Why they would be doing so without receiving incoming messages from the devices is another matter.
I was feeling hard done by at having about twenty-two devices powered off for a week but only fifteen being reported offline. The ones not showing offline being all my Matter over Wi-fi devices, probably an IKEA/ Sonos, and one device I never got around to identifying. However at least they behaved like offline devices should.
Hi @Mykines
In case it happens again, feel free to send us the logs — that would help us look into.
When you start checking the devices (e.g., removing batteries, etc.), please start the logcat to monitor the driver logs and observe the incoming reports.
Itati and everyone who’s helped here - thank you! I haven’t had any issues since so hopefully this is a one-off thing. But I will grab logs if it happens again.