Hello everyone,
A year ago, i was looking to enter in the smart home world. After searching through different hub. I finally choose to go with fibaro HC2. A year later, i’m a bit disapointed with the reliability of the system. I didn’t had time to learn to code in lua and integration of device is sometime complicated if not impossible. (camera not working, door lock not working etc.
I’m still dreaming of an easy to use and reliable system.
I’m about to try to sell my HC2. I woder if i should give a try to smartthings or just wait till a truly reliable and easy system come to market.
Could some of you give me their tought on this?
For info,
What i would like to include :
5 cameras,
4 light switch
3 motion sensor
2 door sensor
once i get everything up and running i would like to add some project.
Thank you for your advices
I would say yes and no. It is for the most part and I enjoy it. Cameras you would have to go with mixture as they only allow 4 dlink on one account. the others you will have no problem. I have over 99 devices and about to install my last 2 switches in a few days. I also have another 2 motion sensors coming for the bathrooms to turn on the fan automatically. My biggest issue as come from the OSRAM RGB lights I have outside. Had to reset both of the once in last two months. I find all devices connected easily and truly plug and play for the most part.
SmartThings is very versatile, and when it works as intended it is my absolute favorite home automation system.
However, “easy” and “reliable” it is not yet. Search the forums for “stability” and “reliability” and you will see much discussion of this. Including the following note from April from the company CEO:
Just last week there was a hub firmware update which broke the Phillips hue integration for some customers.
Engineering is aware of it and working on an emergency fix. But it seems like something of this nature happens every month or so.
Since last November, I have yet to go 10 days without an impactful SmartThings failure.
So I certainly hope the product isn’t “mature” yet because it has a long way to go to reach reliability. But it’s clear that the company has committed to doing that, and they have invested considerable resources including The recent hire of Amazon’s director of engineering.
So my hope is that things will continue to get better. And I have heard that the Fibaro controller system was particularly unreliable, a disappointment since their end devices have been so good.
I wouldn’t be surprised if SmartThings is better than the Fibaro controller. But better is still a long way from a reliable plug-and-play home automation system.
2 Likes
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
5
It’s very easy to use and it’s very reliable.
Unfortunately those two things do not occur that often…
But you will be extremely happy, if you just keep your expectations low.
But on a very good note, it’s still much better than wink!
No, seriously, much better than wink.
Yes, I’d recommend it, highly, to the right techie kind of like to tinker people.
But absolutely do not expect it to be any kind of a security system!
What @JDRoberts and @bamarayne said!
For me, it’s been fun and is mostly useful as a monitoring tool & a small amount of lighting automation. I was hoping to replace our ADT Pulse security system, but SmartThings isn’t ready for that, IMHO.
[Do wish ST was Lua compatible, as I’ve done a lot of embedded Lua programming! But, groovy is “just another language,” LOL!]
What problems are you having. I have had a much different experience, but I also trimmed down my automation a bit. Except for occasional spike in latency, I didn’t have any problems for the past month or so…
Ya, can’t afford my rate, either. But ST is (mostly) doing what I need: monitoring a second home a long way from here. If/when it can do more: that’s cool
Routines failing to complete, having to bump start apps that have lost state, yea latency as well. I just decided not to do any baby sitting for a month to see what would happen. One day something works, the next day it doesn’t, next day same thing, different automation…
Since I stopped drinking with st everyday I can’t think of a single day where something didn’t work… next day that one works, something else didn’t.
I am kind of waiting for the platform upgrade dust to settle before digging in and trying to sort it all out…
Problem with that plan being st is still a construction site.
Sorry man, I hear you. Been there, done that. And ny conclusion was, use local processing/ local devices as much as possible and hope for the best when it comes to cloud. My routines have been rock solid but I only operate a handful of local devices. As for latency, well that one is annoying as hell.
Did this for about three months back in March. Got very busy at work and was frustrated by the daily care and feeding so I just walked away and let it be and fail.
It was a basically a paper weight at the end of the 3 months. Still makes me really question how reliability can be rated high by anyone.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
15
I ended up letting my hardware expand by about 50% while at the same time moving from RM to CoRE and integrating askAexa.
Basically I created a nightmare cluster f**k of programming with different apps and pistons trying to do the same thing to the same devices at the same times…
I’m still sorting it out. I promised the wife I would spend less time messing with it at home… So I just do it more at work now lol…
But I’m trying to get it all situated without talking down the entire system and starting from scratch… Which is what I think I should do… Just too lazy!
Plus, I still need to get the rest of the hardware installed and set up before I start the programming from scratch again.
My only problems have been latency issues over the past couple of weeks. My routines for mode changing are Rock solid. Everything turns inn, but sometimes the turn off command gets lost… Who knows…
I’m still happy with it… I just need to take two whole days and make some magic happen to get stuff organized.
