Why wouldn’t you use different emails for each hub? That way if needed you could give access to certain people on each hub instead of everyone having access to everything? Just curious about your set up.
Several reasons:
- My family and I own and are the primary users of all 3 houses. Whatever user insulation I need I attain through the use of Contact Lists.
- What a pain to log out of one account and into another on the mobile app. Changing locations is difficult enough, what with all the issues getting the mobile app to display the right list of devices and SmartApps after switching location. And the WAF is already challenging - “Honey, you have to log into a different account or the house won’t know you are home!” isn’t going to fly.
- I have more than 400 devices and upwards of 50 SmartApps deployed across all of these locations, several with intentionally customized DTH’s/SA code. Imagine trying to keep all of them updated and synchronized under different IDE accounts. Today, I update one, and ALL my devices are updated simultaneously…
- Notifications - if I had multiple login accounts, for which location would I receive Push notifications on my mobile phone? I’m pretty sure it’s only the one I am currently logged in to. So, a power outage, smoke alarm, or door unlock could go unnoticed. Not that I use SmartThings as a security device, but I prefer to know what’s happening when the caretaker sets off the alarm because the battery in his fob died…
- Ask Alexa. Yup, I have 3 Alexa accounts, one for each location. My implementation allows me to Ask Alexa about any of my locations from any of my locations (each ST Location has a unique Ask Alexa activation name). I can turn the heat up in the vacation home from my primary residence, and vice versa. Managing 3 Alexa accounts is a royal pain - it is impossible to keep all the locations in sync. I have thus far avoided this problem with SmartThings…which makes the Alexa integration with SmartThings quite a bit simpler than the alternative ( which would require 3 x 3 = 9 unique configurations to maintain).
Things could be better still - my wish list includes:
- ALL notifications from SmartThings should identify the Location they are from/for/about (at the very least, if I have multiple locations under one account).
- Alexa should support multiple locations under a single account as well
- SmartThings should actually finish the multi-location/multi-user effort they originally had planned, so that the issues you reference of multiple different users are solved…
Thanks for asking!
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Just got email last night that my other hub will be updated Thursday ---- unless that email was for the hub that already got updated on Monday 
. Good thing I won’t be home (for the times specified in the email) to watch the update happen, LOL.
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It makes more sense I guess since you only have the same people in all three locations. But just a few notes. I have two locations set up with 2 different accounts. I simply added myself to location B when A is my primary residence. I don’t have any issues at either location knowing when I’m there. Ya it can be a pain to have to switch over to the location that I’m at to do something, but in all honesty, I don’t even have to do that all that much. At home, Siri or Alexa can control everything. At location B, wall switches are all smart and I can use ActionTiles on a wall mounted tablet to do anything else. You are right though, with all the same users you don’t need different accounts. Is there a limit on the amount of devices one can have on a single account? Or does the multiple hubs help out with that issue. If you want the notifications to let you know the location, I’d suggest making custom ones with Notify Me When or Core. But with all your devices, you might break those programs haha. For your notification quest on 4, yes you would still receive all of the notifications. I’m not the primary on my Location B, and I stay logged in to Location A all the time. I still receive all notifications from both hubs. Since you are setting them up with contacts, it doesn’t really matter if they are connected to your hub or not. I have contacts set up who don’t even use ST to receive certain notifications just because they are located closer to my Location B in case something would happen and they can get there before me. They are not computer smart by any means, but I can have texts sent to them via ST.
Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really was just curious about your set up.
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What I meant was, going forward, can you provide changelogs for Zigbee device firmware? Perhaps a device firmware page that includes the latest firmware for specific devices along with what’s changed/fixed in each release of firmware.
It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to provide release notes for third party ZigBee device OTA updates.
For the record, my hub just updated. In the 2 hour period including the hub update, the hub downloaded 246.4MB and uploaded 5.4MB worth of data. The update process also took approximately 50 minutes.
Hi all - there was a problem with the update server when put under the additional load of the update that caused downloads to go significantly slower than expected for a while, and caused the update to take longer than expected. Things look clear now - if your hub is updating and currently showing a magenta LED, it should finish and come online shortly. We’re looking into the exact cause to prevent problems with Thursday and Friday releases.
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Thanks for the information! 50 minutes is definitely on the longer side of things (we have box-and-whisker plots showing download times) but entirely possible with slower internet. Was this on a cellular connection? We designed the client to resume downloads when interrupted (restarting only the last ~64K chunk) based on problems we saw when testing on cellular/flaky connections. The other possibility is that you were impacted by the server issue Nick mentioned which we continue to investigate and will sort out.
The time it takes will primarily be dictated by network speed (unless you have fast, reliable internet in which case flash write time becomes the slow point). Future updates will do the download while running, so the added offline time is unique to this migration update. The beta users went through several updates after the migration and the general feedback was good (i.e. most people did not notice that it happened).
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Mine is scheduled for tomorrow. Crossing fingers.
Once again I really applaud the fact that you keep us informed. Much appreciated.
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Are there any plans to make these available to the UK? Are you working on this? It’s highly frustrating that we miss out on these things!
OSRAM bulbs in the UK are completely different. They use ZigBee Light Link instead of ZigBee Home Automation, like the bulbs in the US. So it’s not quite that you’re missing out. The bulbs in the UK don’t have the same routing issues that the bulbs in the US do, so the updates aren’t applicable.
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I’m on a 30down/5up cable internet connection, which is rock solid. I’m not really bothered by how long the update took, I was just keeping an eye on it because I was curious. Although, in general I prefer updates to happen overnight while I sleep 
Tyler so do the manufacturers send ST the firmware updates? If there are any updates to z wave devices e.g. Yale locks can I request the maufacturers to send ST the updates or is there also a way for users to install their own firmware updates? (I doubt it but would like to clarify it)
We work with manufacturers to test and deploy ZigBee (not Z-Wave) device firmware updates. It’s a somewhat short list so far. There is no way for users to apply their own update.
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Interestingly I’ve had similar issues to users in the US with Osram bulbs. They would often come on randomly or reset to full brightness at random.
I assumed that even though they are ZLL here that the issues were the same. Especially as other UK users have mentioned that updating the firmware has helped them. So there must be something in that firmware that helps.
Ideally I didn’t want to buy the Osram hub just to update them, but it doesn’t sound like we’ll be getting OTA updates in the UK anytime soon so I might have to.
Ok, I think the slowness in this case was due to the server issues we encountered today which led to significantly degraded performance during the update for a time window.
For anyone that may still have a hub that is offline (our queries are showing a few that may be in this state), we encourage you to contact support and note the LED behavior. We’ll be reaching out as well as needed.
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I have gigabit ethernet to the house. My hub has been blinking magenta all afternoon.
Anyone else having this issue?
Mine stayed down. I unplugged it. Obviously, even after restarting the Hub last night, the update fails for some of us. I don’t even have any strange code or too many devices and still didn’t receive a good update. I got home at 7:00p Eastern and it was stuck offline. And they stated they don’t want people requesting a forced update. What a shame.