Scheduler and Polling quits after some minutes, hours, or days

Yep, it’s been over a year now, and schedules are more unreliable now than ever. They are working on a fix, with no time frame estimate offered.

I just posted another one here. It’s ridiculous now, I can’t run a single app. The timers die within 1-2 schedules. 30% of the times the apps won’t initialize because the platform craps out on the unschedule() call. If it manages to get past that then after 1-2 cycles it dies again! Why won’t ST fix this???

1 Like

Why won’t anyone throw some support behind the idea that the Community could build a workaround Device Type for “Schedule Driver” that conforms to SmartThings’s existing schedule methods? With apps like SmartTiles, SmartRules, SharpTools, Rule Machine, etc., the Community has shown we can work around SmartThings’s limitations much quicker than they can fix the platform.

Looking for contributors to finalize the draft standard to implement a Proof of Concept:

3 Likes

@tgauchat
Why must the community always fix ST shit code or implementations? ST will never support anything the community does to fix something. Guess that’s a good plan for ST, they do this enough they won’t have a reason to pay for a support team because they won’t have anything to support outside of Samsung hardware which seems like that’s all they are adding support for anyway.

1 Like

Is that a rhetorical question? It has a pretty real answer:

  • The community “mustn’t” do anything. Everyone here is welcome to leave the platform, change to a different product, or take other consumer actions.

  • As to why the community does workarounds anyway? Well, simply because “we can”, and, due to factors outside our direct control, SmartThings has proven itself to be generally slow to solve a problem than we can solve it ourselves.

Keep in mind that the particular “solution” I’m promoting (and the similar workaround that folks are using with some success…) are not likely to be copied by SmartThings, so we’re not saving them any work … in fact, some of the workarounds we develop are actually discouraged by ST engineers.

The hypothetical reason that we must fix the bugs: SmartThings is just a drawn out Beta / MVP project, and we’re all Beta testers of varying degrees of tenacity. Not unusual for early adopters and tinkerers … frankly, that’s still the majority of all low-end home automation consumers.

2 Likes
2 Likes

I have been trying to find a work around for my scheduling problem and I don’t think it’s a polling issue exactly.

I have an Ecobee 3 thermostat with several remote sensors and I am using Yves Racine’s app EcobeeRemoteSensorInit to expose the sensors to smartthings and report their values.

This app uses a service manager of some kind to “poll” the sensors every 5 minutes and just like everybody else due to the instability of the platform it runs fine for awhile then craps out.

Now on the smatapps page there is a manual “trigger” button that looks like a play button.

When this is pressed everything runs fine for awhile again.

I am trying to figure out how to use something else (rule machine, pollster, etc.), to trigger that play button.

Pollster doesn’t do it and rule machine does not have an option to run another app upon a condition.

Any workarounds someone can think of?

Cheers,

Matthew

If you need a tester, @tgauchat. You know I am always here to try something new.

1 Like

As far as I know, there is so no direct way for one SmartApp to call another.

The “PLAY” button you describe is a result of the SmartApp subscribing to the 'appTouch` Event.

If the simple solution: If you can ask @yvesracine to add alternate event subscription (such as a Switch or Momentary), then you can easily add a Virtual Switch or Virtual Momentary for Rule Machine (or any SmartApp) to “on()/off()/push()”.

Or modify the SmartApp code yourself; ask if you want hints…

I have 6 ecobee 3’s running for a month or more without a lost token.

I setup a hardware clock/scheduler. Everything works great.

The only piece that I have not replicated is Smart Lighting, but since I don’t use it with any time based events, it hasn’t been worth it for me to catch the once in a great while failure of an off not trigger a few minutes after an on.

For the first time ever, last night my chained timer rule kept running all night. Usually, it fails within several minutes. This rule simply reschedules itself once a minute, changing the color of a light strip so it’s easy to see. Hmmm. Did something get fixed?

2 Likes

I was going to comment the same thing; I haven’t seen a timer failure all night - which is unheard of (I usually get one or two every 30 minutes spread across a dozen app instances).

My Schlage lock timers are normally 1-2 hours late. This morning it was only 4 minutes late

No failures since I’ve posted my previous comment; something about time based events has definitely changed in the ST platform.

I can also say that I have not had any problems, and I certainly had lots of them, since this morning.

I wish Smartthings would keep the community in the loop as this is/was a major thorn for a lot of people.

Cheers,

Matthew

2 Likes

So what did they actually fix - has anyone at ST let the cat out of the bag yet? They may have totally obsoleted my analog clock/magnet/door sensor poll trick. :wink: I did notice that Big Talker / VLC Thing is now showing an event every minute…something I don’t recall seeing spam my “recently” before.

Is this really true? I haven’t seen a failure to run my task every 5 minutes in about 20 hours now. I thought it was just because i went with schedule(cron_string… but that seems too easy that the rest of the community would have tried everything already.

Longer schedules are working so far. Shorter ones die in a few minutes

1 Like

Well my 5 minute one gave up running last night around 5:30 and my morning routine didn’t fire this morning. Guess there’s still more work to be done. I was hoping this was fixed so I could finish my app.

1 Like

###It is definitely not fixed.

Several basic timed automations (e.g., turn on light when motion but off after 5 minutes) did not work this morning.

3 Likes