I actually genuinely hope that’s true, but I’m not going to rush out and buy some of their stuff just to find out. I’d venture to guess that its 10 times easier to get a new customer than to win back one you’ve lost, which is why I think Samsung should be less ambivalent about SmartThings.
I kind of wonder if the reason that there is only one ST hub on the shelf at my local Home Depot is because Samsung doesn’t themselves believe in it and aren’t going to put marketing resources into making more angry and disappointed customers? I hope, as someone else here has suggested, they’ve got the whole ST team busy working on a new secret project or something, that will receive the full backing of Samsung.
There are some things that I like about the ST. The openness of it is great, as is the price, and it does work… sort of. I just feel that as it stands, ST is not as reliable as it needs to be, and there are huge holes in the feature map. It’s a hacker toy, not a serious home appliance, and Samsung doesn’t seem to be throwing a lot of resource at making it better- at least not in ways that we can see.
I’m willing to pay double or even 10x more for a product that’s bullet proof! That said, I’ve worked with Crestron gear before and paying 10x in no way guarantee’s you bullet proof! Hence, I hope to find some middle ground with Control4. My buddy in the home integration biz swears by it.
When did you get yours? Smartthings has really improved over the last year, imo. I agree, it is still sort of a hacker toy. I wouldnt recommend it for anyone else in my family at this point because it isnt exactly consumer-grade yet. Unless all you want to do is turn on lights (And you can settle for only xx% reliability doing that).
Before you go over the edge, you might also want to consider moving away from all ST standard apps. I know, it sounds crazy. I have found that CoRE and other community developed apps are much more reliable than Smart Lighting. I know others will say the opposite, which is fine and probably true for them. I have automated the shit out of my house to the point where we don’t use the app or physical switches for much at all. Yes the platform has gotten better for me in the last couple of months, but I’ve also abandoned Smart Lighting.
Most of my automations are too complicated for Smart Lighting anyways…
That’s good advice. I wrote the original post at a time when I was just starting into CoRE and was excited about it, only to discover that the ST app wouldn’t allow me to select the Location slider, thus blocking me from about 1/2 of its functionality, at which point I kind of lost it.
That’s been addressed above (thank you rontally!). So yes, I’m still hopping CoRE addresses my concerns.
It’s the little things that can frustrate you the most! I’m glad I could help and I hope you give ST a little more time. It really does offer a lot for the low buy in cost. Once you get a handle on CoRE and the IDE then, oh boy does the possibilities seems endless!
You might also look at the Securifi Almond+. It is a router with built in home automation features. I’ve got one and I love it. SmartThings is still my primary device, but I use the Almond+ as well.
Good luck with that. I have Almond+ and after over a year waiting for any type of integration with anything, or the ability to add devices not on their very very short list of " approved " things I gave up. After a year in development all their Alexa skill can do is change it from Home to Away mode. You can not actually control devices. I’m still on their beta team, just so I can break their FW on a regular basis. You think ST has mesh issues ? Try putting your wifi radio in the same little box with your ZigBee and Z-wave radios. Feel the heat coming off of it. Then tell me how many times you mesh fails.
You can thank me for discovering the 50 device limit Securifi put in their ( outdated version) of WRT. Now you can edit it in the settings. Have any combination of Wifi & HA devices that goes over their limit of 50 and the whole thing has a mental breakdown. A+ in not HA, it is home remote control with a nice touch panel.
Actually, I see the value in a post like this. People will having similar experiences, and others will be perusing prior to purchase.
For myself, I am leery of trying to cram too much into ST. I think some folks are seeing it as more than it claims to be, as a container for every single thing out there. It’s a cheap home automation system; to imagine it can be, for a hundred bucks, everything you get from a $2000 upfront plus $30 per month system is kinda fringe… and to demand it be all that is ludicrous.
2 Likes
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
34
Actually, if the user wants to put in the time and effort you can do just about anything with ST.
But if you want an of the shelf system that tells you what can and can not be done… Pick any of the other ones.
Well, an update on my situation. I had a couple of non-existent devices in my z-wave network that were messing everything up. Spent nearly 2 hours with support yesterday afternoon, initially over another issue, but then in rebuilding my z-wave network. They used some of their god powers to force delete these non-existent devices and rebuild my z-wave routing.
Much more stable, which is not to say everything is perfect, but I can generally establish cause and effect now. When things are happening… or not, seemingly at random with no correlation to any of my rules is when I start to think the platform is hopeless. Intermittent bugs are nearly impossible to debug in your programming when the network is also dropping messages, and devices are reporting incorrectly.
ST feels much more predictable at this point. I still have 1 device that’s detecting motion but not reporting it sometimes, a new yale lock that’s not reporting its state properly, and a couple of programming issues I could iron out, but I feel like the rest of my devices are behaving rationally and I have the issues compartmentalized and contained.
That ain’t exactly what I was getting at. I’m all for experimentation, making things work, etc.
I just think that with so much of the heavy lifting occurring in the cloud, there is no value in putting things into ST that can be done just as well or better outside ST. That approach might lighten the load on ST’s cloud, thereby improving performance across the board. I’m a sysadmin, and I see the effects when users overload a system. No system is perfect; they can all be adversely affected by heavy loads.
Just a thought.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
37
I understand that… But as a user, I don’t care. I purchased the product for the versatility and power of the platform. It’s up to ST to make sure the system delivers.
This does make me wonder how they intend to pay for the cloud service long term. It seems like one $99 purchase isn’t going to pay for 20 years of riding their cloud…
The hub has 2 USB ports. Once the system is sufficiently developed, offload the cloud functionality onto a USB memory chip. But that won’t be soon, as they are clearly depending on the user community for development.
I don’t see that happening. The cloud is their compute infrastructure. If they are going to localize compute for us (praise be the lord if so), it would make sense to offer on some other compute the hub talks to over IP… but I suppose it could be a USB, just not seeing the advantage to doing USB. Not a lot of compute heavy USB that I am familiar with.
In any event, I doubt ST is motivated to localize compute, I think the cloud is their model for a reason (data mining, what not).
