Hub Firmware Release Notes - 0.24.11

It’s been my experience that the kind of testing you refer to has gone missing across the industry. It isn’t just SmartThings under Samsung–just look at all the ‘new and improved’ app releases you load on your phone. Introduces an ‘exciting, new feature that will help you so, so much’ and breaks existing functionality.

Testing properly requires a lot of resources, tools, skill, and technical acumen. Not something most major corporations, driven only by profit–not customer satisfaction–seem to care enough about to invest in.

Lack of those resources probably pi$$es off the engineers who write that code…

Now back to the program in progress…

On this end, I’m finding my ZWave devices have yet to fall off the network (2 hubs in 2 locations)–but, performance has slipped to the cellar. Walk into a room, watch the motion sensor blink, then count to seven or eight before the light comes on. Used to be only a second or two.

Seems like there is more than a firmware release clouding things up here…

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I totally agree. I was in this last beta, and most of the others prior to this latest release. There were issues that many people reported during the beta, but nothing like what the production release is having (for me at least, and I was quite focal in the beta).

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Can’t argue that point!

I’ve been busy and haven’t had hours to invest into migrating everything to my Hubitat hub yet. Saving that project for a free day.

9 more z-wave devices were offline last weekend, fully excluded and re-included. But two of them fell offline hours later. I excluded and re-included again just now.

What’s interesting is when I re-include z-wave devices this week, the old device is still present in IDE/mobile app even though I excluded it at first step. It makes migrating smartapps to the new thing instance super easy, but just shows how buggy things are at the moment.

Oh, and my bedside cree bulb keeps flashing once about every other night in the middle of the night. I turned off OTA updates but makes no difference.

Also getting slow response times and occasionally my Zigbee kitchen dimmer doing erratic things.

The silence from ST is deafening. Of course I never even got a notification that the hub fw update was coming either.

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@Dlee
When they say offline, are you able to control it from the SmartThings app?

When they are offline, do they show unavailable in the SmartThings app?

If you can turn them on and off in the SmartThings app, do they then show available and online?

Are these devices that are running local or cloud?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. They show offline in IDE (I only tried device status in mobile app once like a year ago and it caused problems). Sometimes and historically (the once every 4 to 6 months after fw updates z-wave problem thing), turning off/on power to devices brings them back. Status updates after hitting refresh.

What’s different this time is some of them are not responsive even when offline when command sent from app or ActionTiles, even after power cycle. And even when I re-include they fall back off in hours or days. It’s often different devices on opposite sides of the house. I have a mix of Z-wave+ and the the troubled old Jasco outlets and switches which became far more unstable after this fw update. Also, after the fw update several ST Zigbee devices locked up, some after fw update, and Cree bulbs went wonky.

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Yup, it’s systemic and ST’s lack of acknowledgment in here, official support site or not, has me more than frustrated.

They have acknowledged the Cree issue via Support. But nothing beyond ‘bear with us.’

The general Zigbee and Z-Wave issues so far are being ignored it seems.

I think this FW update was a disaster. I suspect it’s not simple to roll back as I’m guessing the Cree FW update can’t be reversed easily. As for the zigbee and Z-wave issues I’m assuming we’re lookimg at multiple issues.

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I all of the sudden found my self running around the house replacing batteries every 2-3 days across different devices. I thought they were all bought about the same time so figured they were all dying at once. Also have had one Iris motion chew through 3 batteries in about 2 weeks till I gave up on it and am using another sensor. Shame on me for not coming on here to check out the comments about this release. I saw the original notice but forgot to tag my self on the thread. Still possible all of these batteries dying is coincidence, but seeing all these comments, not all that likely. I didn’t write down which ones I changed so can’t easily go back and check where they stand now.

The one thing I always wanted was better battery reporting. But this is redic. Like I understand its hard to judge the voltage/amperage curves and properly tell you when a battery will die. I dont care about that I care about how much before the sensor stops working. But we’ve went from next to zero sensitivity for the battery, to maybe hyper sensitive…and maybe even to the point where we are consuming batteries at a crazy clip. At this point all my major use sensors have had battery issues. Still the other side of this is the fact that there’s no way of knowing battery issues unless you open the app. I’ve got my system so well automated I normally go weeks without opening the app. But now we are in the ‘well crap they messed things up again’ where Im in the app daily just to make sure stuff is working right.

This FW update goes up there with some of the ‘great outages of 20xx’ stories at this point for me. Seriously up until this I had not had to do really anything to my system in months. Maybe power cycle a light once and a battery here and there. Now for 2 weeks my system has been in the ICU where you get your vitals checked every 2-4 hours.

@Kianoosh_Karami I myself am having major issues. I came home last night to a switch in my garage offline. This one switch caused half of my house not to work. After trying to do the following:

1 zwave repair - failed

2 zwave device replace - failed

3 zwave device exclude - failed

4 zwave device force remove - failed 3 times before success

After that device was removed the whole house was working within 10 minutes.
I have added that device back in, and seems to be working ok again.

Today, I woke up to at least 5 of my devices all showing in the app logs offline online almost every hour. Then I noticed that 5 ZigBee devices were offline. I have never had a ZigBee issue in 2 years of using ST.

My entire system was working perfect until the bright idea was conceived to update the Groovy Code and push a Firmware update that seems to have not been tested.

The online offline of my devices in the app activity logs started after the groovy code update

The zwave and zigbee issues all started after the firmware update

On top of all this, none of my automations will react to mode changes any more.

Why has it been almost 3 weeks with no resolve or updates on this matter?

This is unacceptable and customers are leaving solely because of the lack of response. Do you guys understand this affects people’s lives and homes?

I am pleasantly asking for an update on this issue before you have a mass exodus on your hands, if ST screwed up, ok, acknowledge the issue and advised it is being fixed!!!

Oh my… I’ve been away most of the summer at my camp or in my RV, so my SmartThings system has not received a lot of care and feeding since May. My involvement over the summer was mainly to change the occasional battery or reconnect dropped Osram bulb.

Until this update came out…

About a month ago I noticed a sharp uptick in the number of devices going offline and especially batteries going dead. Unfortunately due to being busy with summer I stopped tracking battery changes in May, but started again a few weeks ago. I’m changing several batteries every week now.

Something is up with this release… Z-Wave is broken, and something is causing Zigbee devices to consume excessive power. I’ve had device health off for months so I know that is not it.

Very disappointed.

Total B.S. still going on today. I mean, WTH @Kianoosh_Karami?!

I wonder if anyone from ST would like to come to my house and fix 5 to 7 switches and a handful of zigbee devices every night for 2 weeks. I bet they’d find this to be a PITA like me, and actually give a crap to tell us what’s going on and fix this junk.

Once you found this ^^^, you cannot move past it. Unless you solve your failure(s) you can expect Z-Wave mesh instability. Why did it fail?

As for Zigbee devices, are they showing offline or they actually dropped off and no longer working.

It’s a little more complicated than that, some zwave repair failures are pretty normal and won’t really cause any other problems. It depends on the exact message and the specific device. For example, if a battery operated Z wave device is asleep at the time the repair tries to contact it, you’ll get an error message, but it won’t affect anything. It’s better to have a clean repair, but it may not be a major issue if you don’t, just depends on the details.

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Have these really stopped working? Try switching the DTH to “Z-Wave Switch Generic” that also runs local. I see you have an outlet on the generic handler, try to flip between the two. But if they are just not working, changing DTH will not fix anything, as I am sure you know judging by how long you’ve been around.

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Yup. Just finished going to all these and pulling the airgap switch, except the outlet (tripped the breaker, and it uses the generic DTH). The DTH doesn’t/won’t make a difference. Been there, done that during the beta.

EDIT. I should add that sometimes manually using the device (zwave only) will wake it up.

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I figured. I’ve updated my post while you were responding…

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No worries @HA_fanatic. The funny thing about all of this is that during the beta everything was going ok until the last 1 or 2 releases before they went to production, hence my very first post as soon as they created this post.

I was just saying to a coworker how well things were going (months in fact), and then 24.11 came along…

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…and you didn’t add new devices or changed anything in your home, right?

I know you have huge experience, but also think you know that is hard for ST to cripple random devices in your home. If they screw up, they screw at large scale.

That actually has not been the forum experience. There have been lots of updates where there were just random glitches occasionally. People usually referred to them in the forums as “poltergeists.” :ghost:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Bug:_First_Reports

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As I read through these issues that you have pointed out, they all seem to be unusual events caused perhaps by cloud flutullantion. Devices dropping off the mesh are more likely to be a local issue. I say likely, because everything is possible. However, logically speaking from an infrastructure perspective, if ST changed something in their backend structure, devices would just disappear from people’s set-ups not just go randomly offline. Likewise, if they made changes to the DTH, many people using the same handler would report the same problem. This is just my 2 cents from a DBA who handles many users and tables.