Should I come back?

You’re always welcome. A lot of people ebb and flow as far as how much they actually have running on SmartThings at any one time. But you might still have devices or protocols that are relevant. Or blue sky discussions about the future of IOT. :wink:

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As with anything, your mileage may vary… I came from the Iris V2 world 6 months ago so I cannot comment on SmartThings experience before then but if ST was half as crappy as Iris back then I feel for everyone. Imagine waking up to learn a cloud glitch orphaned 80+ Zigbee devices and having to re-pair and rebuild rules. (The platform doesn’t allow Zigbee grafting) Now imagine that happening several times and having support point the blame wireless interference and claim they can’t fix it.

Or imagine coming home to a dark house unable to turn on any Christmas lights or have any anything work because the hub randomly disconnected. Support pointed the finger at my router dozens and refused a fix until hundreds of complaints came in. Now imagine that happening 3-4 times a week for several months.

Yeah, SmartThings may have really sucked, but they hardly took first place in that race.

I can say that my 6 months with 237 devices on SmartThings hasn’t been perfect, but about 98% reliable and for me, especially after the Iris nightmare, is good enough.

Apparently you are like me. Just lucky. :wink:

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And I’m sure the are a lot of us unlucky buggers. I got hit by every ST issue including those that were apparently US only issues. I’ve posted videos showing two minute delays on actions. After switching away from ST I am enjoying home automation again. But I was in a really bad place for a long time… If I was living on my own it would not have been an issue. But ST left such a bad attitude to home automation in my house that it felt I was paying to get crap from my family over it… Even after switching away, any fault in my programming is amplified because of the ST issues. where not one week went by without without one… But now things are far better. Just fat more tedious to program…but i have managed to do stuff that I didn’t manage when using ST such as integrating Zoneminder and Vera well… But there are also some limitations to o especially with communicating with other cloud API’s

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Yes, SmartThings is deceptively easy to integrate with other cloud API’s, but what good does it make if the end result is as unreliable as its weakest link? Stick with what works. Less is more. :slight_smile:

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Well an interesting thing happened this week. If any of you remember from a long time ago my main issues with ST other than state loss was Zwave unreliability and lots of CRC16 error events in the hub event list. Which resulted in huge delays in zwave actuation.

So this last week i finished migrating all of my devices over to Vera. And guess what I had the same issues with the Zwave network on Vera. But the difference is that Vera has the tools to diagnose this quickly.

Turns out that this was caused my two Aeon Smart Plugs which are in close proximity to each other which send very regular energy usage updates. So when these plugs are not near each other they work fine but near each other they produce issues with CRC errors and constant flooding of the network with retries which ties the zwave network up so other commands are delayed.

So I have worked around this configuring the devices for less frequent updates and I have swapped one of the plugs with an ST plug and problem solved. This was diagnosed in minutes on the Vera.

Months of attempting to diagnose the same issue with ST failed. On the plus side I now am using ST again as I have a good way to tie in both products as I have renewed optimism with ST after finding the root cause of the issue I was seeing. And I have a good method of using both platforms in unison.

I have decided I am going to use ST for cloud and Zigbee devices as it’s more mature for both. But use Vera for zwave and dashboards as I started using imperihome on my wall mounted tablets when switching to Vera and I love using my wall mounted tablets for TTS instead of trying to use my Sonos devices as that just never played nice with TTS when you were listening to music. And unlike smart tiles (not used latest version so may be possible now) I can switch dashboards based on events such as when someone rings my doorbell I can change the dashboard view to a full screen video of my front door cctv camera for example.

Anyway I wanted to announce that I am now back in the mix and will start getting back up to date with things in the ST world and will get back doing some development I think.

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Congrats! I know how much you struggled with troubleshooting your problems. I am glad you figured it out. Hey when you feel like writing more, can you elaborate on why troubleshooting with vera was so easy. Also, can you tell us more your TTS setup?

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Yes sure. The reason is simple. The CRC16 error event was the only place you could visualise the issue. It didn’t even show on the zwave debug section before ST revoked the access to this. In the CRC16 event it showed a device guid that did not match any of the guids of my devices.

On the Vera in the Luup log it showed the actual zwave ID of the device that it received the corrupt packet from so was very very simple to troubleshoot.

Its frustrating this was the case. I always said more zwave visibility is sorely needed for when someone gets this type of issue as it will not be uncommon.

As for my TTS setup the imperihome app has its own API in which supports TTS, voice recognition or dashboard page changes. If they did the same with ST I would use it over SmartTiles any day in a ST environment see http://dev.evertygo.com/api/local for info on their api

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Welcome back! I’m sure you miss the community! :smiley:

This is what I find the most interesting. I wonder just how much of the frustration out there is due to issues like this that should be simple to diagnose and fix like this one, had the right tools been there.

Add it to the list of things to fetch our pitch forks over.

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Some of it, I’m sure, particularly when the platform is stable.

But yesterday is typical of what I think leads to greater frustration where the customer has everything working just fine, the platform introduces changes, and then multiple things start going wrong.

Immediately after the update, the first problem was that new automations could not be saved from the android version, not even SmartLighting.

Also, there was no way to set a timebased routine to a PM time.

The first of these was fixed after about eight hours, but the fix appears to have introduced a new problem where smart home monitor neither loads nor can be arm/disarmed. And the new problem affects all types of phones. The Problem is ongoing.

This “works on Monday, fails on Tuesday” pattern is, for many of us who rely on home automation for practical uses, by far the most frustrating, IMO.

Note that The kind of device problem that the OP is describing can then be fixed by the customer, while the “fails on Tuesday” problems are often completely outside of the customer’s control. :scream:

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EVERYTHING YOU SAID I AGREE WITH 100%, I should ensure nobody thinks I am now attributing more of the ST issues to what Fuzzy pointed out than it deserves.

The vast majority of issues that I see around here, including the ones that get under my skin, have nothing to do with this.

Lost State, for example. Zero correlation to this at all. However, I do see folks reporting issues that I have never had and I have no idea what causes them. @SBDOBRESCU for one.

Yup.

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Yup i was affected by the cockups by the ST team (some missing State), i had to redo large portions of my setup four times in a year for issues outside of my control. that did make me furious and the last time it happened i left ST. however that was not the biggest gripe, it was just the straw that broke the camels back…i was dealing with consistent delayed or missing actuation which would leave lights on when i leave or automations just not working in a consistent manor. even when everyone else on the forum was saying things were fine. i once posted a youtube vid showing switching my garage light on taking over 2 minutes to actuate.

however if i move all of the zwave issues out of the equation its not been “that” bad. i said before that ST is a polished turd. simple fact is that i have now tried out a fair bit of the competition and i can say they all have their problems. but ST is definitely the easiest to develop for and add bespoke zwave and zigbee hardware to. i would not move my stuff back from Vera as its working extremely well, however i have missed the flexibility of ST. a hybrid solution IMHO is the best solution and is working very well for me now. but turd was a bit much to say.

the thing is, this community and the renewed openness of ST as a team to address the basics is hard to beat and no other HA product has anywhere near the following or indeed has @JDRoberts

i would not however be tempted to move the core of my automation back as the toolset needs more diagnostic tools and the reliability i now have is excellent, however configuring automation’s is far easier to do in ST, for example to do a motion activated light can be done in CoRE in a single rule, however in Vera using PLEG takes four individual rules which is hardly user friendly

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But you should stop being negative because your negativity negatively affects their otherwise positive experience. Sunlight and facts are not welcome!

:slight_smile:

Wow. I wonder if that is due to limitations in Vera or just pleg is not very friendly/simple as it’s own doing.

I wonder for Vera could be with @ady624

Welcome back

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What, why four? That’s crazy. Can you stop the motion activated lights by flipping a phisical switch or you need four more rules to do that?

Hey, hey, just because I was more vocal doesn’t mean I am a lone star. I know a lot of people with system issues that I never experienced, like self opening garage doors and locks…And dropping zigbee devices is as common as poor home networking management.

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Sorry, I find this confusing. :thinking:

SmartThings has a developer platform which is where you write groovy. But they are 100% closed, black box style, with regard to any network management tools. You can’t see associations, you can’t even get the neighbor tables. Most certified Z wave controllers at least let you run the Zensays tools; SmartThings does not. It’s one of the least open certified Z wave controllers on the market with respect to network diagnostics.

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