Who would have paid for that?
SmartThings launched as a pretty darn successful Kickstarter Project, but ( $1.2 million - product costs) / “thousands of man hours” = far too little salary for anyone.
Have you heard of MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?
1 Like
Normal round-trip to cloud is a couple of hundred milliseconds, at most. There are other sources of lags in the system, most notably from z-wave devices that don’t report state changes promptly.
The complexity of ST is well beyond anything going on 25 years ago. You’re looking at a vastly distributed event driven asynchronous realtime system that hangs together pretty well for the most part, considering its complexity. Somebody did something right here, more than may be obvious at first looks.
3 Likes
Fair points both, I take them onboard and was undoubtedly being over simplistic and provocative.
As some defence…
I guess I’d have thought $1.2M would translate into 30,000 man hours.
Why did I see comments that Smartthings are moving some processing onto the hub if the cloud is fast enough ?
1 Like
OK. I suppose its a pity the Kick Starter backers didnt get any of the $200M Samsung paid.
$40/hour for highly skilled tech workers including taxes and benefits? What country do you live in?
It’s not entirely a question of being fast enough, per se, but more a reliability issue. Take lighting automation as an example, where you do notice 300 milliseconds of delay. When you turn on a switch, how quickly does the light come on? When you trip a motion sensor, how long before the light goes on? In a perfect world with ST where everything is working up to snuff, the lights coming on in 300 milliseconds is great, plenty fast IMO. But, if there is a hiccup on the internet, or in ST’s cloud, that can turn into 3 or 4 seconds, or even more. That’s not good for lights. But, with local processing the internet is not in the critical timing path or event execution path, nor is the cloud processing in those paths. So, lights are “snappier”. Lighting is very sensitive in this way, more so than most other automations, thanks to our visual acuity.
Irrespective of local processing, the full power of ST is brought to bear because of its cloud architecture. There are load management challenges to this sort of system. What happens at 6:00 PM on the dot when everyone’s automations all shout for attention? That doesn’t happen for most other minutes of that hour, but now and then event traffic spikes. How to manage these spikes isn’t obvious. ST has issues with it, still, evidently. So local processing certainly helps reduce the amount of your system’s event load that is being put at risk through the cloud, while actually not reducing the overall event load that ST sees by very much, nor reducing the spike problem in the cloud, as the cloud is still going to see the results of all of those events, after the fact.
3 Likes
I don’t understand how these can’t be queued.
What happens on Black Friday midnight when millions of people press “Buy” on all the sale items on thousands of websites???
You and me both. They have “issues”, as my 18 year old daughter would say.
But, in all fairness, I think the answer is beyond our pay grade!! (That doesn’t take much, now does it?) How easy it is for us to armchair quarterback what ST struggles with. I have a lot more empathy now than I did. Crap, backwards compatibility is HARD, and costly. People have running automations out there, that need to keep on running. That’s hard to do, hard to maintain, and hard to upgrade.
2 Likes
So I did have some point then.
At the moment it takes 8 seconds for the virtual dogs to bark 
UK. I worked for less than that at a FTSE100 company when I was a young masters graduate. I guess everyone wants to be rich even while they are supposed to be entrepeneurs taking a risk in the hope of enormous equity rewards (which they have now achieved).
Whatever happened to starting in a garage with nothing but $100, a bacon sandwich, and an idea?
1 Like
[quote=“Spinny, post:109, topic:3338”]
So I did have some point then.
[/quote]Of course.
Having conceded that – about your issues with the mobile app and screen real estate and all of that: The mobile app is a tool for configuring your automations. You can use it to control things, but that’s not its purpose or strength. Once you have your automations set, you don’t really need the mobile app on a regular basis.
If you want a very cool way to see and control your ST system, get SmartTiles. That’s a light-weight web based tool for controlling ST, and seeing everything you want to see.
3 Likes
Yes, thanks, got that earlier tonight. Nice.
1 Like
[quote=“Spinny, post:112, topic:3338, full:true”]
Yes, thanks, got that earlier tonight. Nice.
[/quote]Then go check out Rule Machine, a generalized rule engine that can do most automations. [shameless plug by author]
1 Like
Thanks again. There is lots to explore here.
Got my sony TV to bark at me earlier when I opened the sweetie cupboard. I was impressed even if my teenage son wasn’t 
2 Likes
All of this technology and what do we use it for? HaHa. How did we ever get on before? 
1 Like
Yes exactly.
I guess it is one of the main things I feel after 3 days of exploring my Christmas present to myself. It starts off as a toy, but then actually you start to think well why shouldn’t the lights just come on when I approach, and why shouldn’t the kettle start to boil water when my morning alarm goes off. How much time have I been wasting walking around and throwing switches all my life
I guess in a few years we will be wondering how primitive life was before we got Smart Things.
1 Like
There are days when my wife is unhappy with me because of ST (days when her closet light doesn’t turn on right away). But then, a few months ago she walked into a room and wondered aloud why the lights didn’t turn on automatically. “Honey, we never automated that room, would you like me too?” Ahh…
2 Likes
HaHa. Yes we quickly take it for granted.
Mind you I cant imagine how long it is going to take builders and electricians to recognise HA is the new norm. They have been wiring in manual switch plates for 100 years.
1 Like
I read the OP just today, and completely agree with all points noted. I felt good that I am not the only one who has trouble understanding, navigating, installing, and dealing with ST in general. I then got rather hopeful at the mention of a pending rule engine coming to ST, from ST. Finally, I noted the date of the post. Over a year ago. Holy, Sh… It appears nothing has changed from that day, at least as is evident to me.
I migrated to ST from a VeraLite a couple of months ago. I have spent far more time in those couple of months getting my ST to where my Vera was, than I did with my Vera in its entire 2 years of use. Yes the LUUP engine could be a PITA to work with in Vera, but at least scheduling events, IF/THEN triggers, etc was exceptionally easy. The only time I had delayed firing of triggers was when my custom loaded code loaded my Vera’s CPU. Now, on ST, I get delays weekly. A couple of seconds may be nothing to some people, but when I am flipping lights on/off, relying on contact triggers to trip lights, a couple of seconds is a life time.
/endrant
2 Likes
I am a new user to ST and dispite being fairly tecnical and having a properly functioning brain, I am struugling setting up my HA with only a couple off lightbulbs and smartphone presence for two people. I keep drowning in setting up 4 modes and all the routines for the things. Having almost similar routines for two modes.
I would just love to tell my things what kind off behaveour they should have in certain modes and tell my modes when to switch. It is so unintuitive.
I am not even sure after 3 weeks if the parameters for the routines are and or or. Like having presence combined with sunset.
Took me a week to find out you can make widgets trough the ST or 3rd party apps. I still not know how to easily switch modes and am not sure if color change is supported in routines somehow when using lightify bulbs.