Hub Firmware Upgrade 16.13 BROKE Functionality

Prior to this “upgrade,” I had FULL control of my Schlage lock. I could see status, battery level, and control locking/unlocking using IFTTT and Amazon’s Echo. Now, neither IFTTT nor my Echo can control the lock. IFTTT pretends to lock/unlock; the Echo says it’s an “unsupported device.”

How is the device authorized with Amazon Alexa - I assume this is what you mean by “Echo”

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Locks have always been an unsupported device. You can get around this by using a Virtual Switch but as far as I know, this should have never worked for you from the start.

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exactly what i am getting at. “security” devices can not 1:1 auth - and if a “security” device is nested within a routine that is a problem. Why I am curious as to HOW this is AUTH’d with Alexa.

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also - BIG assumption - NATIVE Alexa NOT Ask Alexa/ Echosistant etc etc

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Sounds more like Amazon caught on. Locks have never worked with Alexa devices. If you have locks included in your good night,good bye etc routine they can not be triggered with Alexa.
That is one of the selling points for AskAlexa & Echossistant is they bypass that Amazon security feature.
I just tried the IFTTT trigger skill for locks with Alexa & it worked fine

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Did you know you could say:

Alexa, Lock Front Door On
Alexa, Lock Front Door Off

Saying Alexa, Turn On Lock Front Door…just doesn’t sound right.

Never-the-less, I would not have my Doors enabled for Alexa. Anyone who knows that you have this can go to a window and unlock your door just buy saying unlock the door…

I have found it to be extreemly useful for us to have a CoRE piston that autolocks the door after a certain time if not locked and locking the door when anyone presence sensor arrives or locking it when anyone leaves.

If the door is unlocked after sunset then the porch light comes on and if it locks then the porch light goes off.

Also set up to lock when SHM or Burglar Alarm is Armed for either Stay or Away.

On top of all of that, if anyone unlocks the doors with a code then it sends a notification as to who or if it is unlocked with a key then it sends a notification that something is wrong because we have no need for keys!

Well, this concludes my rant. Moral of the story, there is no reason, for us, to use Alexa to unlock or lock the door.

Wow…some misinformation here. The Amazon product is officially the Amazon Echo; Alexis is the nickname for the assistant built in to the device (among other Amazon products).

It is incorrect that Echo has never worked with locks. Amazon’s own site has a “locks” category under Echo Smarthome Devices. Why would they show this if they purposely do not support them? Whether they are directly supported, or supported through a service (like SmartThings) is certainly a valid response. But a vast majority of Echo’s functionality is through services and “skills.” The security hypothesis (that Amazon is going to block devices that could compromise security) is also invalidated by Amazon’s own product information. On the Echo product page, it shows the “Garagio” skill (among others). Does that mean there would be no security issue if someone gained access through opening a garage door?

The, “anyone could go up to your window and say unlock my door” comment is only correct IF that particular skill/phrase has been enabled in the Echo ecosystem for an individual’s device(s). In my case, it isn’t. The ONLY thing I had enabled the Echo to do was LOCK the door–never unlock.

The fact of the matter is that it worked, and now it doesn’t. It doesn’t work through the Echo, and it doesn’t work through IFTTT directly. And it stopped working the day the upgrade was pushed to the SmartThings hub.

Nobody said that locks were not supported. It is in fact a built in security " feature" for Alexa ( Amazon virtual assistant ) that you can not lock or unlock a lock or run any routine that has a lock in it.

Nobody is saying that yours is working, what everybody ( except you ) agrees on is that it has nothing to do with the ST hub FW update, since you should have never been able to directly control a lock through Alexa. Yes you can create a virtual switch and turn on on/off and have that on/off trigger lock /unlock. That is not direct control, that is building a loophole.

I would love to know how you enabled a lock ( or any switch for that matter) in Alexa to only be turned on( locked ) and unable to be turned off ( unocked) . Either a device is enabled or it isn’t. Unless of course you had a virtual switch linked to lock command . Which of course is NOT directly controlling the lock with Alexa, it is the loophole.

The only misinformation I see is your own. You came in asking for help you get 6 replies and then come back and say that you already know how everything works and those trying to help you are wrong.

Good luck.

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Direct quote from this thread: “Locks have always been an unsupported device.” Tell me how that is, “Nobody said that locks were not supported.” Really?

I didn’t say that anyone said mine is working. What you did was snip one sentence out of a complete paragraph that was meant to illustrate that it worked prior to the update being done, and now it doesn’t.

If you re-read my original question, I was very clear that the lock was controlled using IFTTT and Amazon’s Echo; there is no misinformation in my statement.

I believe that, perhaps, you do not have expertise in IFTTT. Hence your inability to understand how it is possible to enable a lock to only lock or unlock using a specific phrase. It’s actually quite common–in fact there are a lot of “applets” utilized for that purpose.

And, yes, I feel the need to correct misinformation when I see it. Others may come here looking for answers, see replies from people who really don’t have the expertise–and consequently are providing wrong information. Then, they leave without an answer, and wrong information. How is that helpful?

What really amuses me about this dialog is that a couple of people act like it’s some “black art” to use Amazon’s Echo with locks. Do a search on “alexa lock door”. This functionality is anything but rare, anything but secret, and anything but discouraged by Amazon. This is a very common use case.

Wow, chill out dude. You came to a USER SUPPORTED community and asked a question. Your peers that use this system provided you an answer, which is fully correct, that it is against the Amazon TOS to use any type of lock/security device. Just because it is not the answer you wanted to hear, doesn’t mean you need give such backlash.

If you want an answer from someone with some ‘expertise’ - email support and wait for them to get back to you. Chances are you will receive the same replay as from here.

I DO have my Alexa/Echo working perfectly on 16.13, with my Schlage Z-Wave locks which I can lock via voice commands (where I have intentionally disabled the unlock ability for security). Given your overaggressive attitude, I’m actually hesitant to provide any suggestions for fear of your reaction.

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I’m smelling a troll. Seems Joel just joined the community last night to post multiple threads on how St broke everything. Every suggestion for a fix is rebutted with an attack .

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I agree. I think he needs to spend some time off the internet until he learns how to play nice with others. I know we have all been frustrated (and at times very vocal) about ST issues/outages/changes but personally attacking contributors of the community is just plain uncalled for.

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There are no purposeful attacks (personal or otherwise) on my part. A personal attack would be if I was calling someone a name, or asserting that someone is dumb, etc. I have not done that, and in fact I don’t really feel that way.

The perceptions differ, significantly. Nobody really addressed my original post, until you tobycth3. Instead, there were comments on why it shouldn’t work, assertions that I provided wrong information, opinions on why it’s a bad idea, and a proclamation that the upgrade was absolutely not at fault–and that I was the only person that thought it was. And, honestly, I understand your hesitation to reply—it’s not really fun for me to come back and have to defend myself–and that is exactly what this feels like. What I can’t get my head around is why it’s okay for people to make unsubstantiated assertions (such as the assertion that it has nothing to do with the ST hub FW update). I have been a member of many forums. And when I post information that I do not really have direct insight to, I am always careful to say, “I believe” or “it could be” or “it might be.” It could be that it does have nothing to do with the upgrade–I don’t know. It’s a pretty big coincidence, however. Perhaps there was other work done at the same time. I don’t know. All I can say is that on 1/30, the functionality I had before stopped working.

Notable to this thread, people will take a snip out of a paragraph and comment without the full context in mind. For example, the IFTTT expertise comment I made was replying to the following comment: “I would love to know how you enabled a lock ( or any switch for that matter) in Alexa to only be turned on( locked ) and unable to be turned off ( unocked) .” I genuinely thought that s/he might not have that level of expertise. I even went on to explain that there are a lot of applets that utilize that behavior.

I’m vexed that yours is working, tobycth3. I’ll have to try more troubleshooting to see why mine has now decided to go AWOL. There do appear to have been a couple of others that have experienced cloud anomalies that coincidentally happened around the time of the upgrade. (None specific to a lock, however.) One followed the same steps I have (remove the device, remove the service, etc.)

I will continue to troubleshoot and will provide any insight back to this thread. I do have an open support ticket.

Its very easy for people’s ‘tone’ to be misinterpreted via text, especially when people quote parts of it. But I think overall the tone of this thread was received by myself (and others as your post was flagged by a few users) as aggressive.

Regardless, I am using Ask Alexa (developed by a community member) that requires a bit of a complicated setup but it will eliminate the need for IFTTT. You will need to sign up for a free AWS account to create your own Alexa ‘skill’ which can control a lot of devices that ST/Amazon can’t naively.

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If you refer back Joel,
I was trying to start to trouble shoot by my opened ended question as to the authentication between Alexa and ST. . . this is the first step - I was trying to discover if you were enabling aVS vs. the hardware (zwave probably) device.

I would consider myself a heavy user of Alexa - natively and with third part custom skills.
Pretty confident we can get your devices back to voice controlled. Have to info. though.

If you have done an ifttt integration vs. a native Alexa or custom skill implementation is essential information for those trying to assist you.

Hi Andrea - Thanks. I totally didn’t get that. Apologies. The way the configuration was working was through an IFTTT/Alexia integration. So: Lock->SmartThings->IFTTT->Alexa. I had an IFTTT applet that had the phrase “Lock the front door,” which would action accordingly. This wasn’t something I heavily used. Generally, the use case was that I’m in bed, concerned that I didn’t lock the door, and wanted a way to do so without having to go downstairs, or to the other room where I charge my phone.

To be really honest, it’s been a pretty long time since I actually created this, so I didn’t even remember the exact steps I went through to get to the final solution at the time.

I quickly realized how rusty I was on this as I had to re-add several IFTTT applets after I removed the integration from SmartThings in an effort to troubleshoot all of this. I’d even removed the lock from SmartThings directly. (Naturally, I’d added both back–with no success.) I probably spent a half hour trying to find a specific applet to do something, before I finally woke up and realized I’d created my own. (Not in the case of the door lock, however.)

Anyway, signs are pointing toward IFTTT. The other posts I read were related to the upgrade process itself, rather than an upgrade firmware issue. (One required the individual to remove batteries and re-insert, the other required the individual to tie it back to the location it was in prior to the upgrade.) For all I know, IFTTT made a change the same day as SmartThings updated the device.

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Do you want to work this issue now? I can try to walk you through a couple of things if you are inclined.

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Hi, sure–awesome. I have traced the functionality back to IFTTT. I just created a new “Do Button” (widget) to lock the door. When I press that button, it doesn’t do anything. (In fact, it doesn’t even log that it was done.)

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well let me ask you a couple of things first. From the use case you provided above, you mostly want to be able to voice cmd your lock to lock, is that correct?

You can obviously go into the ST app and toggle closed on the zwave device, so I want to be sure I understand the intent of what you need to accomplish.

And- just food for thought - have you thought about using an automatic close smart app to assure that your garage door is never left OPEN for a predetermined amount of time?

WIll you entertain a virtual switch to gain this functionality? This will eliminate a “hop” in the process — this would be Alexa to ST (eliminating IFTTT). There maybe some reason I am unaware of as to why you have done or may want to use IFTTT.

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