Official Ecobee 3 Integration

[yvesracine]

The best way to deal with those connection issues is to report them to ST, and hopefully, they will address them
when they realize that there are a lot of ST users out there who are experiencing them.

I did report some connection issues myself quite a long time ago (linked to the security certificate amongs others), and here what ST support responded at that time:

Chris Porter (SmartThings)
Jun 30, 6:02 PM

Hi Yves,

Thanks for letting us know what you are seeing. My developers have been aware of this happening for a little while now also, and have worked on it. I will let them know your thoughts about it being the security timestamp being outdated.

I don’t have an ETA around implementing a revision to the code, but developers do currently know it is not working consistently for users, and are addressing it.

Thanks for the heads up, and the suggestions.

-Chris P.
SmartThings Support

In the meantime, I’ve observed that these issues come and go. In a specific week, they will be a peak of connection issues, and then few days after, the connection issues will disappear, and they will be no issues for more than a month.

I suspect the ST platform (and sometimes also the ecobee servers) to be the root cause of those connection issues. This could be some connection pool management issues at ST or others.

In brief, as I said in the community wiki and many times in other threads, I don’t have any control on those connection issues in my code.

Examples of other ST connection issues:

Stock Ecobee device

Having to authorize Ecobee 2-3 times a day

I connected an Ecobee Smart Si thermostat to my setup last December. It had been working flawlessly until I bought a second last month and set it up as well. The thermostats are in different locations (obviously using 2 different hubs). I’m using the smart labs app for Ecobee that Smartthings developed. Everything appeared to be working fine. But I then noticed that my thermostats started losing their link to the Ecobee website. I would have to go through the process of relinking (authorizing them) 2-3 times a day. I’ve since de-registered the second Ecobee and tried to get my setup back to where it was before I added the second. But no luck. I’m still having to re-authorize the remaining thermostat through the Ecobee app 2-3 times a day (even though it worked prior to adding the …

TCP Hub

SmartThings losing connection to TCP hub

Lately, My SmartThings hub has been losing connection to my TCP hub, which controls my lights. It’s happened several times in the last week, and overnight the last 2 nights. It might have been happening more than I was aware of, because the lights weren’t dimming reliably due to another bug (http://community.smartthings.com/t/scheduler-quits-after-some-minutes-hours-or-days ), for which I recently implemented a workaround. The only way I have found to reconnect (temporarily) to the TCP hub is: On my cell phone app, I go to SmartThings Labs -> Tcp Bulbs. On the Connect your TCP Lights to SmartThings page, my username and password are already entered. I click Next, then Done. It seems to work for 1-4 days after this.

However, I’ve implemented some defensive coding to notify the ST users of any connection issues. That’s the best I can do on my end.

And, if you read carefully other threads (like the one I posted in my previous post), ST has connection issues with other devices as well (ex. TCP hub).

P.S. What make ecobee more susceptible to losing its connection is the fact the ecobee is the only cloud provider (that I know) that asks to refresh its authorization token every hour. My code has the required algorithm to do it, but if there are connection issues at the same time, you’ll then need to manually reauthorize ST to reestablish the connection with ecobee.

Bye for now.