I have several minimotes around the house that I use to turn on and off lamps. I used to have these setup with the old Button Controller app, but I switched to the Smart Lighting app so I could control dim levels. I have a button press setup to turn on/off and setlevel to 100% while a long press does the same but at 30%.
The problem is that now the minimotes seem to fail to register the first button press. For example, if a particular minimote has been idle for some period of time and I press a button, the LED will flash but lamp doesn’t come on. Pressing again will cause the lamp to turn on as expected and subsequent presses will behave normally (again, until some period of idleness).
Yep. It’s apparently a known thing at this point. If you look in the activity feed, the minimote is actually registering the button press, but the smart app isn’t actually firing, for whatever reason. I’d still put a ticket in (the more tickets, hopefully the more priority it’ll get), but it’s something to do with the Smart Lighting SmartApp that they’re gonna have to fix on their end.
I have put in a similar ticket. I believe what is happening is that the Smart Lighting app is tracking the status of the light within its own context. So each child instance of the smart lighting app would work if it was the only input to the light. If you use another minimote to change the state of the light then the first minimote is out of sync and can take some clicks to catch up.
You don’t even have to use a second minimote to cause the problem you can do it by turning the light on with a routine and then it will take more button clicks to get to turn off with the minimote. Once I realized this is what was happening the behavior of my minimotes was at least explainable.
Hopefully an update to Smart Lighting will be updated to fix this behavior.
Huh, I’ve got two minimotes at home, so that would certainly be an easy thing to test… I hadn’t considered the fact that the app might be tracking the status. Hmm… something to check when I get home. Thanks for the tip!
This is exactly what it looks like to me as well. I played around with my minimotes, and they behaved exactly this way. Clicking the button one for an action that’s on both made the other fall out of sync. By pressing the button on each remote, I could actually keep one minimote from ever responding, presumably because the context stayed out of sync in the app. Good call!
@jody.albritton@slagle do we need to pass this along to support or are they already aware of it? I’m pretty sure the ticket I submitted before has already been closed.
Just want to make sure the proper folks are notified about this. Thanks!
I have 3 minimotes and I have been having this problem for a while too. Looking at the activity feed, I could see that it was sending the incorrect command on the first button press, sending the OFF command when the light was already off. I tried other apps looking for a workaround. Hopefully they will fix the problem quickly, but until then I’ve been using SimpleRuleBuilder.com to make rules that check what state the light is in when a button is pressed. On each button press, one rule checks whether the light is on and then sends the OFF command if so. A second rule for the exact same button checks if the light is off and then sends the ON command if so. I also have rules for long-press to dim each light, or to change to a different dim level if it’s already dimmed. It requires a few extra rules, but it hasn’t failed me yet unless I try to toggle the light on and then off very quickly.
is there any update for this? Rule machine works just fine in these same scenarios that smart lighting is failing. This is a pretty annoying problem. It basically makes smart lighting completely unpredictable for button toggles. right now i’m only using smart lighting for things that i don’t need toggles, because this issue is completely intolerable.
The toggle on/off should check the current state of the devices before taking action on them…IE: if it’s already on, send off. If it’s already off, send on.
the only issue is when there’s a mixture of device states. even rule machine can get into a weird state when that happens with some things toggling on and other things toggling off…but, it’s a less annoying problem than nothing happening at all. Rule machine has the “private boolean” option to basically make it act like how smart lighting currently does, but I think ultimately we need 3 options, the current behavior (aka private boolean), rule machine’s behavior (toggle opposite state for each device individually, even if this puts everything into mixed states), and a last final option that I am proposing, which would be something along the lines of the “majority state wins, with on/off selectable for tie-breaker”
i don’t think it’d be too hard to code the last option - just something to count the number of devices selected that are reporting on/off and weigh them against eachother…majority wins, and the opposing state is what should get sent as the toggle. If it’s a tie, have a selectable option as to what to do, on or off in a tie…
i think this would be the only way to handle this problem that covers all possible usage scenarios that anyone might have.
Wondering if this will be resolved. Been retraining the family that ST is not broken, you just need to press each button once to wake things up, and the second will actually do something.
Not optimal…this is a long known issue. Having the minimotes and my lighting run local has been awesome on v2, except for the incessant button pushing.
@slagle is there any update on this? Seeing this thread reminded me to bump my ticket and the response that I got from support confused me a bit more as to the possible solution.
Just to come back – this is still a thing for me too. I may be crazy - but it seems like sometimes it affects my Amazon Echo integration too. It seems like it saves the light state somewhere in a variable and then if something else (another instance of Smart Lighting or the Echo) changes the state of the light, the variable and the actual light will be out of sync.
This problem still exists one whole YEAR later? Smart lighting saves the toggle state and if the light it switched on or off by any other means then it is out of sync and the first press seems to do nothing.
This is a VERY easy to fix and other smart apps like button controller enhanced lighting operates perfectly. I can toggle the light on with the minimote then have alexa turn it off. The next press on the minimote turns the light back on which makes perfect sense. The only thing is that smart lighting operates locally while enhanced lighting does not which is why I need smart lighting to fix this issue.
Can we PLEASE have a fix for this? It shouldn’t take a day to have this resolved…
