Frustrated by the state of things

Thanks for jumping in Jim, ticket was in, since Sunday I think. But was driving me crazy not to know why routines break. Now I do :smile:

@Jim You know what I failed to recognize? That are now logs for routines, a week ago there were none. Was this pushed recently, or is part of enabling the ‘display extra events’

I’m not sure about that off-hand, sorry. I guess I didn’t really notice no logs being there; I had noticed them a short time ago while trying to debug some of the scheduling/routines issues. I guess I took for granted that they were there.

They don’t need an engineering background. less than 5 hours of searching and reading on the internet and you can get up to speed understanding what you are looking at. I ordered my sniffer on a monday and using google on my lunch hours and when I got home I was ready to understand it and use it by the time it arrived. as long as you can read at a college level you can use these tools if you are not afraid of learning.

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It’s not fear that keeps a “college level average consumer” from putting forth the effort you describe, it’s that even tech gadget fans have a limited amount of time and patience to spend on any particular project.

It doesn’t take an engineering degree to set up a basic 5.1 speaker home theater system either
 And yet even PhDs go out and buy a simple soundbar because it gets the job done in 5 minutes instead of 2 hours. And you can bet that if the soundbar was acting flaky in any way, it would go right back to Best Buy the next day or weekend
 Ain’t nobody got time to sift through forums or even call tech support.

Well
 we do. But that’s the point. It’s a matter of motivation and genuinely enjoying the journey, even if we’d prefer to do more sightseeing than tire-changing. The mass consumer market: they’ll take a bus or plane, thankyouverymuch.

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Sure, but that’s a different target market than the one that SmartThings ads are aimed at. It’s not about what you can do, it’s about what you want to spend your time doing.

Previously discussed:

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Oh I completely agree, but honestly I warn friends away from Smartthings as well as all other consumer cloud based systems because none of them are ready in any way. I tell them, “Don’t buy any of it as it just is not ready.”

I have a friend that really likes what I am doing, and I have a V1 hub to give him but he just does not understand that it’s a toy that will not work all the time and it takes tinkering. And I know he will not bother with learning but instead bother me constantly to do things for him.

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As @JDRoberts would say all home automation is local. As an anecdote my elderly parents have SmartThings at their house and they don’t even know how to operate it. They have had very few complaints and things have just workedTM for them.

The key to the success at my parent’s house was keeping things simple. Trust me when I say, my mom is not someone who would just live with something that annoyed her on a daily basis. She would chew my dad’s eyebrows off if the system got in the way rather than remained invisible.

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Thank you for this! I’ve had a similar, but slightly different issue I’ve been dealing with since last week. That is, my Routines run, but not the Mode changes within
 which has the domino effect of causing any mode-dependent actions to fail. I’ve been able to restore service (for 1-3 days) by deleting all Routines, removing all mode restrictions from smartapps, deleting the mode(s), and then putting everything back.

I was reading your post this morning around the same time I discovered mode had failed again, and couldn’t even be triggered manually. Since I had left live logging running overnight, I started looking for bogus setLevel. I didn’t exactly find it, but I found this:


Those 3 log entries each show all 6 of my Routines. They occurred as soon as I accessed the second setup screen of the Scene Controller app. This app makes extensive use of setLevel. The thing is, Scene Controller is (was) attached to a simulated Minimote, which was not being used, and it has NO connection to either Routines or Modes. It is only used infrequently, and only manually. As a test, I have uninstalled it and the simulated device, and then did the workaround I described earlier. It may be unrelated to my issue, but at least it gives Support something to look at (and gives me hope!).

Does Scene Controller offer the Selection of a Routine to execute?
If so, this trace message is just the SmartApp query to find your list of available Routines so that you can optionally select them, if you so choose.

Unlike other Objects in SmartThings, “Routines” do not have Object IDs. They are only referenced by their full text-string names. :confounded:

Ugh, you’re right. I never noticed. Oh well, I’m no worse off.

My head is spinning only reading what people are going through to make their HA work. Looking back just three weeks ago, I gutted everything and started over. I came to conclusion that, the best approach is
eh, it is what it is, they’ll fix it sooner or later or hopefully something better comes along


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VeraPlus is coming soon and it has zigbee too from what I’ve heard.

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OK, I don’t understand this. My automations have been working well for the last few days. I had one app tank, and I just opened it and hit Done. I had one scheduled thing not fire, so I just redid that, and it’s working fine. So why is it that my 150 thing system is working fine, and yours isn’t? Why is it that ST has some users reporting that everything works, and some reporting that they are hosed??

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I think that platform is hosted on multiple servers and some has propagate pushed changes and some not.

Definitely something wrong with the system. I am reviewing my GEOfencing log and I am seeing entries for Home locations that I deleted months ago. I am getting “REST call: FAILURE: Home_New: 403 Forbidden” along with a few other temporary home location that was created as part of the migration.

Emailed support about this a few days ago and didn’t hear anything back from them.

Well, I tell you why. You are not using Smart Light and don’t rely on routines (as much). Plus, it seems like the iOS is holding better than Android these days. Plus, it bugs me when things don’t run as they should, and that’s really not a good idea when it comes to ST, because the way you do things change on regular basis. I am glad they do change on Saturday, usually, because I have extra time to play on weekend.

A bunch of fixes will be implemented by ST soon
I can certainly wait ‘few weeks’ (more)

I have over 30 Smart Lights automations, and they all work. And, I have a dozen Routines, and they all work too. As for iOS and Android, how they function has nothing to do with how the ST backend functions. I don’t have things “change” on me, as to how they work, ever. ???

Going to report it tonight, but I got a log notification of something about an error with netflix. Interesting, because I don’t have anything in ST related to Netflix, at all, ever
 eek.

This thread has info on it. Reported to ST support: Hystrix exception?

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Interesting. I had two things that have changed on me only this week. First, how routines handle the setlevel. I had no problems for almost a year where I was turning on non dimmers and dimming lights at 10%. Now I can’t. Had to go in and change things around. And second, I used to be able to remove runin times and the app would save, now I have to put 0. I don’t mind tinkering, but is frustrating when you have to spend time to figure out what is wrong. If someone would publish a list of system changes, would be so much better. Well people would still fuss because they have to follow the changes, but it would certainly avoid the mass confusion as to why things are not working.

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