IFTTT Virtual vs Simulated Switches

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
1

Hi All

I am fairly new to Smartthings and the smart home. I recently am trying to set up my smart house but ditching my old wired alarm system and hooking everything up to the Konnected system. I installed a few iPads around the house running SharpTools to interface all the lights and switches across the house. Most of the switches in the house are the Itead Sonoff ewelink with a few TP-link Kasas for the 3-way light switches. I have absolutely no problem with the TP-links. I got about 20 Sonoffs installed and are running their original firmware (non-flashed). I am using IFTTT to make them work with Smartthings via a Smartthings hub V3 and virtual switches. I paid for both the IFTTT pro and ewelink advance so that it still works nowadays.

The problem that I am running across is that smartthings sometimes is not recognizing the state of the Sonoff switches if it is turned on or turned off by something else other than through the smartthings app/ sharptools or if I mix and match the triggers (such as turning it on via smartthings but turning it off my the manual switch… smartthings will sometimes think the switch is still on but i turned it off manually). As far as I can tell, everything is setup correctly in IFTTT (4 applets per switch for all combinations).

I think the issue is IFTTT is not communicating with my locally ran virtual switches that the state has changed most of the time. I am wondering if I should convert the virtual switches to the cloud based simulated switches? I read that samsung will move away from the cloud based switches eventually but I need to get this to work now. Plus the delay from Smartthings VSwitch to IFTTT to ewlink is horrible. I really do not want to flash each and every Sonoff since they are already installed in the walls behind all the light switches.

Thanks for your help!!!

2

It wouldn’t do any harm to try it. There are some minor differences between the virtual switches and the simulated switches and users do report that one or other seems to work better in certain circumstances though I’ve never really understood why (the most significant difference is that the virtual switch flags all on/off events as state changes even if they are on → on or off → off).

I wouldn’t worry too much about local v cloud though. Yes the virtual switches can run locally but only under certain circumstances, which these days pretty much means for a subset of Smart Lighting rules and only then if all the other conditions can be handled locally too.

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I converted everything to simulated switch and smartthings still sometimes does not detect that the device is turned on by the manual switch or via Google assistant. Is there anyway for me to force a refresh on smartthings to automatically check the state of every switch? Or even ifttt to check? I think the problem may be that ifttt may not be sending the state to smartthings or something getting lost along the way.

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Flash those babies and pair them to ST. No middle man and your issues will be solved.

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Ron, you are right… I broke down and bought me a FT232RL FTDI to TTL board to flash it this weekend. This IFTTT ewelink crap is really annoying me. I got 22 sonoffs in the wall I need to take out but this is going to be better in the long run. And I paid for the ewelink advance subscription to get it to talk to ifttt. I going to cancel that if I can because the service is horrible.

Thanks all

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