All Hail Twack!
btw, did you guys have developer hours this week? I’m at the LeanUX conf in NYC so I haven’t been keeping up.
@thegibertchan are the spotters showing up for you in the Quirky Labs App? If so did you do anything else outside of the obvious add to Wink app, then try and discover in ST via quirky app?
Actually @andy, I don’t see it on my list either. I tried refreshing the app, no luck.
Also, the IFTTT integration is pretty lame, it only does temp triggers, and they don’t seem to be quick triggers either.
@thegibertchan I am both pleased and disappointed, I really wanted it to work for you so there was hope I could get mine functional tonight, but I am happy to hear that it appears to be just broken and not isolated to me. Hoping we see a fix in the near future.
@twack has been working on it for a few weeks now. I know he’s been busy with it; not sure what the issue is, but he’ll get it resolved shortly - then again, it’ll prob need to be reviewed with the ST QA prior to release. I don’t think there’s going to be another release till next week though, I may be wrong.
So as many of you noticed, we launched support for the Quirky Pivot Power Genius power strip into the SmartThings Labs category. @twack has done some awesome work in getting all of the Quirky devices integrated - we just noticed some reliability issues with the Spotter itself so we wanted to take some additional time to test further and investigate a bit more before making it available. When the follow-on release happens, you’ll see a Build forum post and blog post similar to the ones that went out this morning announcing and describing the integration.
More info on the Pivot Power Genius:
- http://build.smartthings.com/forums/topic/quirky-pivot-power-genius/
- http://blog.smartthings.com/news/smartthings-updates/new-additions-to-smartthings-labs
Thanks,
-d
OK, so I’ve had a Quirky Spotter for about 2 weeks now. I’m just using it with the Wink app on my phone. I regret to say that it’s just about worthless. The moisture/humidity sensor is garbage. I wrapped the thing in a soaking wet paper towel and it would not go above 58% humidity. The temperature is several degrees off from my thermostat and another thermometer in the same room (they both match each other). The motion sensor (should I say vibration sensor) is not very helpful. And the Luminosity sensor can only tell if a bright light is on or if it’s dark. Very flaky and unreliable.
I would never trust this thing to interact with anything in my home that I counted on.
Am I the only one who thinks this thing is a frustrating piece of junk? I’ve been wrong before.
So far my experience has indicated that spotter is ‘nearly worthless’ as well. Vibration sensing has very limited usage even as a laundry machine sensor - unless you don’t mind continuous on/off notifications every second -, and light sensing is a joke. (they have to have lux reading instead of arbitrary bright/dark standard, although I doubt that sensor itself is capable of accurate reading.) Sound sensing is also a mystery power that I cannot figure out what to use if for.
But in my case temperature reading has been fairly accurate and humidity also in a ball park, and that is why I’m waiting for smartthings integration before I determine if this is completely worthless or not. If ST integration turns out to be seamless they may serve well as a $20 temperature sensor. Good thing that thinkgeek.com has 90 day return window 
I think if the spotter works reliably, it would be great as a baby monitor sensor. Leave it in the crib to sense when they’re movement. crying for loud noises, and maybe even seeing if the room is getting too hot. Then again, if you get some false positives, it may drive you nuts, or even worst, it doesn’t sense when your baby may be having trouble.
Hello all,
I have been testing my spotters (2) for the last three days. It’s not a scientific test, but it was enough for me to set my expectations for their use in my house.
Vibration:
- Setting next to one another, I would shake each at the same time. I did this at least 100 times over three days.
- The motion tile would show active on each within 0-4 seconds when shaken.
- Aprrox 1 out of 15-20 times, one of the spotters would not register motion or would stay "active" after motion stopped.
- The above error was not particular to one spotter in particular, it seemed random on each.
- The next "shake test" seemed to clear the issue and they reported in sync again.
- If I had an iOS device sitting next to an Android device, the devices did not always report the same. This seems to be a ST error.
Light:
- I never could get any repeatable method to test this sensor. I tried a black box, but that did not work.
Temperature:
- I set the spotters next to a SmartThings Multi over the three day period.
- All three devices reported with 3 degrees of each other over this time.
Humidity:
- All three devices reported with 4% RH of each other over this time.
Sound:
- Could not find a reliable test. Very rarely could I get either to register and sound
Battary/AC Power:
Summary: I will not be putting these in a “Must work” situation. Like I said in an earlier post, they’re going to act as Dryer and Wash Machine notifiers, which is not that critical. Realize this is only “my two units”. And I am basing my future use on my crude testing. Your mileage may vary. I think they are on sale for like $20 at ThinkGeek now so if you want to try them on your own, it’s not that big of an investment. I hope they come out with a more reliable unit in the future, otherwise I probably won’t be buying any more until then.
I hope this helps,
Twack.
Much thanks to @twack. Your experience is similar to mine; fair temperature/humidity sensing and unreliable others. I’d keep them even if they work only as temperature/humidity sensor in ST, and Quirky would owe you big time for making it so much more useful.
As for vibration sensing, I think at least they work most of the time but the problem is that there is no dampening of the signal. I wish there was a way to filter low frequency signal out, like ‘notify only when vibration lasts or stops for more than N seconds’. Right now it pours out notification for every little vibration that my mail box was filled with over 5000 wink notice mails in a few days.
ps- would it be possible to release spotter support as a beta and have people here test and report problems? Or even have the code available for people to contribute bug fixes? (i’m no programmer so I may be saying nonsense.) Exposing app to more than 2 test units may help ‘spot’ the problem faster 
Wait a second… When the quirky spotter website says it detection motion, it really means vibration? Wow that’s misleading. I guess what they should really say it the quirky spotter detects “Lateral Motion” lol.
I wanted to use these as motions sensors in individual rooms in my house. Guess not…
Yeah, Tim. I’ve had the same result that @twack and @defcon have had. They are the most unreliable device I’ve purchased since starting all of these home automation projects. The temperature and humidity are they only thing that are decent, hopefully @twack integration into ST makes it worthwhile. I would like to graph and log the history of the temp and humidity.
The “motion” - basically vibration detection is nearly worthless and the sound and light are worthless.
I’m really considering sending them back to ThinkGeek, even though I got them on sale for $20, still might not even be worth it.
I finally figured out how to reset the Spotter after a failed paring in android. This is for resetting it in android twack posted how to do it from Apple mobile devices. I don’t have any Apple mobile devices so I thought I was screwed.
-Click “add a new wink device” (I know thats the first place you would look to reset a device… lol)
-Then hit the three dots in upper right(menu for android) and you will see “Clear Device Settings” (dont push yet it starts the countdown immediately)
-Remove power from the spotter and take out a battery.
-Install the battery and while the lights on the spotter are flashing do the clear device settings and hold the screen up to the spotter the same as pairing.
-After the light show the spotter should start flashing amber like it did before it had been paired.
-Now try the setup again.
I just noticed that ST quirky app started to see spotters (yey!) It reads light, acceleration, sound, humidity, ac power status, and supposedly temperature but it’s been blank. I refresh the tile but no temperature reading, and it seems so far only manual refresh fetch any data from spotter. I have only one spotter out of three on a/c so I’ll test other two on a/c if temperature works when I get home tonight.
Same here - No Temperature. That’s the one thing that I would have liked most. Probably won’t be long now they have it working.
When I added my spotters it didn’t report temp then I checked the quirky app and they were all in battery mode even though I had them plugged in. I reset them and thy showed up in ST with temp reporting but a few minutes later they were back in battery mode and now.
I can’t seem to get them out of battery mode I’m going to unpair and repair them.
Thank you guys for reporting this.
There is a bug where if there are no batteries in the spotter when paired, it will throw an error and not report temp. I’m working on the fix now.
The short term work-around is put batteries in the device before pairing. If you have already paired, put batteries in, and tap refresh. Sometimes it may take a minute or two for the battery level to register with Quirky.
Back to the fix now…
Twack
I’ve taken out the batteries and hit refresh. The spotter now only stays in battery mode. 
I’m attempt to reset it.