I fully expect Hub v2 will have its own set of initial teething issues and will require updates to resolve those.
However, re-read what I wrote - “Hopefully Hub v2… …provides the opportunity to remedy the parlous state of support for dynamic addressing and dynamic discovery”.
I didn’t claim Hub v2 would fix anything, nor did I claim it would be the panacea for all our ills.
I base my hope on the belief that Hub v2 will have a much beefier hardware spec than Hub v1. The current hub is based on the PIC32MX695F-512H. That’s a 32bit microcontroller with 128KB of RAM. You can do quite a lot with 128KB of RAM when you’re programming with C/C++ and/or assembler, but you also sacrifice a lot, both in terms of how much state information you can retain locally as well as in terms of access to/use of otherwise readily available open source software written for beefier environments.
@chuckles I have reserved ip’s for both but the Sonos always misses its notifications (mostly). At least they get allocated the same ip after router reboots and ST recognizes them. Harmony hub has its reserved too and is always a miss and support thankfully is there but it’s definitely not a sustainable process for the harmony and above all how many of regular non-techie customer messes with their routers or even know what a Mac address is?
With reserved IP addresses I find my Sonos systems works fine with SmartThings. If they move to another IP address, however, then they will not work. The Sonos SmartApp will happily re-discover and identify the Sonos player but will then refuse to add/update it in the the SmartThings environment as it already exists. Returning the player to its reserved IP address on which SmartThings originally discovered it instantly returns it to life under SmartThings.
I can’t speak for the Harmony yet as I’m still awaiting the firmware update from Logitech to enable SmartThings integration for the original Harmony Ultimate. It doesn’t surprise me, however, that it may suffer from the same problem.
And this is my point exactly. If SmartThings properly supported dynamic IP discovery (and re-discovery) then customers wouldn’t need to deal with this.
It is great to hear so many stories from folks like me who are passionate but frustrated. Welcome to the early adopters club! In fact, in the “early days” of smartthings I thought that I may be able to make living developing apps and deploying smartthings solutions for others… but not any longer or not right now at least… the reliability just isn’t there yet.
As far as an investment, my sump-pump quit last year and I was able to replace it before there was any damage at all. That saved me 10x of my investment thus far…
As a fun platform to hack the internet of things and for non-critical things like turning lights on and off, it’s fine… really. Hang in there gang, this will come…
My frustrations have been building too. Not only with the persistent problems but the lack of resolution by customer support to a single problem.
The most prominent issues that I can think of at the moment…
Smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S5) presence has zero reliability but yet this is one of their key advertising points. Every time I email in about it, they give the same response…reset hub, uninstall app and reinstall, etc. I’ve done all of this a 100 times. I shouldn’t have to reinstall the app every time I go somewhere. I live in WA state and was in CA for over a week. ST showed me at home the entire time. Customer support did recognize it as a known problem at one point and keeps wanting to blame it on the phone and/or android os. Umm…it’s a Samsung phone, if no others work right with ST, Samsung surely should.
Flashing of selected lights on alarm doesn’t work and there is no app function to edit/update once you program the lights to flash on various alarms. I had a false alarm (wife cooking) and only set outside lights to flash. Well, all inside lights flashed too. They sent me pics of what the app should look like and that shows a Flash Lights option to edit/update but it is non-existent on my phone. (Samsung Galaxy S5) I also sent them pics showing the lack of option on my phone to edit/update flashing lights (only has initial setup option) and they still just gave me run around answers.
Been getting false open door statues on one of my ST door sensors here lately. Again, useless resolutions by customer support.
There are a couple of other issues I’ve had but cannot recall them at the moment…
It is bound to be the latency, cloud for everything, no local control as we all know. Just based on their statement that everything is going to be alright I have spent thousands. To be fair I knew what I was getting into. Things were improving with the so called major upgrade but after those few days after Halloween, it is totally downhill. Did we get any firmware or app upgrades after so many complaints and ranting all over the community? I admire and love them as much as anybody else and well, at times action speaks better than words and being the nicest and the most passionate people around doesn’t work. I can’t even think of badmouthing them as I know what they are trying to do and how difficult it is. But once you hit the market, and have to stand out, just being nice doesn’t help. I admire @ben, @tyler and all of these guys and going all the way to help us on individual basis but there has to be something very very wrong with the process…
Not necessarily. I think we’re seeing a startup company that is just hammered by their own success, and struggling. In all fairness, ST is running one of the largest and most sophisticated distributed event driven control systems in the world. Who else does that? We are each very sensitive to details such as a light turning on late, and I have to agree that there are a lot of glitches and issues right now. But I don’t believe there is something fundamentally wrong with their approach. If there was, it just wouldn’t work at all. I share the frustrations about this level of reliability, it’s quite problematic. At least my wife isn’t going nuts over each glitch anymore. I have over 100 things, and am aware of 2 or 3 glitches per day on average, and I’m doing some non-trivial things with ST. I wonder what the actual error rate is, or reliability level is.
@bravenel if you spend some minutes (will be a waste of time) following my posts since the day I joined couple of months back to this particular specific post, you will see a pattern and a trend… it is a cruel world where it doesnt matter where you are Google. Apple or ST. I will be the happiest person when ST will be in the same league one day. I love them and equally passionate about them as I have been saying and feeling from day one. My choice is to go totally silent as things are right now or to make them aware that they are taking a step backwards. i could have done without them but willingly chose to be a part of their family and speak. Any device that I have can be controlled by chamberlain, ADT, Philips and hundreds of other iOS apps, Frigidaire, Honeywell. But I chose them for a purpose right? Coz I believed in them and even now I do and I LOVE THESE GUYS!
I cannot claim that I know about their approach more than them. But as an average user and part of this community I do know like all of us here when things are working, improving and when not. And that’s my point.
Tons of systems, most of which work. IMHO, the current state of SmartThings is either broken, or not properly designed for the purpose it was intended for. There are 2000 of us here, and maybe 5 to 10 times that total. A drop in the bucket when you consider systems processing credit card transactions.
When I am at the In 'n Out and hand them my Google Wallet card, I am receiving a notification on my phone before they can hand me my card back. That’s 2 to 3 seconds from their terminal, to their merchant services, to MasterCard, to Google, to my phone. All secure, confirming my available balance.
SmartThings had to know that they would have thousands of customers; the fact that they can’t support them shows shortsightedness at best.
To Scott’s point, my 2 cents is it is doable! You have to hit the average consumer base products first and get them right. Leverage what they already own. Capture that market first. Who doesn’t own hues, GE links and harmony remotes? Even sonos to that matter! Who doesnt own a garage? Get them going and certify that your product works at an average users house. Then hit the more complex ones… Support fixing one case at a time will not work however good they are. The higher ups must listen to the call. You have such a passionate fan base, enchash it before it is lost.
WE ARE WITH YOU ALL THE WAY BUT PLEASE ADMIT THE BASICS.
More than 90% of the average consumer will not know what a zigbee or zwave protocol is. Forget that they won’t even know what a cable modem and a router is, their placements, the channels, the interference, the cloud base latency for everything…they won’t care. They care for a product which actually works right every time with no tinkering. I would assume that absolute majority of the community group that’s with you are techies and will go all the way till you make it. And isn’t that priceless. Don’t miss this chance.
I’m pretty sure SmartThings as we once knew it is dying in front of our eyes right now. The number of things not working or needing to be fixed or reconfigured is just silly these days. And the slowness and glitches are painful.
From Ben’s recent posts which are mostly attempted humor rather than useful information to resolve or inform on issues, it is pretty clear they are not taking these issues or our user experience seriously right now. SmartThings either has new priorities and are abandoning the current user base, or they are having one giant party and not getting anything done for three months now.
Most of my issues are documented in community threads by others or myself and those all have replies stating fixes are just around the corner. These go back several months though. No fixes yet. New issues are increasing and the old issues are not getting resolved. It’s as if the engineers are all suddenly working on something else like integration with Samsung washers and dryers to keep management happy…
