So here’s the problem. I made a virtual switch in Smartthings, and using Tslagle’s home director app I’m having the mode change to “movie” once the switch is turned on.
In harmony i’m trying to program all my activities with the switch to “on” when one is started, and thus enabling movie mode in ST, but the problem is, Harmony just says “Failed to retrieve state” when I select it in home controls, and therefore won’t let me edit the state to on.
Tried manually turning it on an off in ST for a bit to see if it’d pull one of those states into Harmony but no dice. Any thoughts?
If you added the virtual switch after connecting to Harmony you probably need to go into the Harmony Connect SmartApp and make sure it’s authorized for Harmony to see/modify the new switch. I would also try reauthorizing ST through Harmony and making sure the new switch is selected.
Harmony’s “failed to retrieve state” error message inside the harmony app means one of two things:
One) your hub or Harmony app Has an update pending. They don’t have an error message to tell you this, but it messes up the integrations. So in those cases you just need to apply the updates and then try again.
Two) the connection between the Harmony cloud service and the SmartThings cloud service is timing out. This can be a problem on either side. It can be intermittent so it works, then it fails a minute later, but then works again. There was a period of about three weeks a couple of months ago when this was happening between harmony and IFTTT and it was just that the Harmony servers were overloaded for some reason. Eventually got fixed.
If you have an IFTTT account, you can try creating a Harmony recipe that has nothing to do with SmartThings, and if you get an error over there it’s the Harmony servers for sure.
Mostly the only fix for this second type of error seems to be to wait it out. Report it to both companies, but likely it’ll fix itself.
(Unless, of course, you have a uk SmartThings account, in which case it’s just broken right now.)