I have been using Smart Lighting app and automation without any issues for over a year but his year during DST time change one of my Smart Lighting automations broke. The Smart lighting was set up to turn on an outlet when a motion sensor detect motion between sunset +45 minutes and 8:45 pm. When DST occurred the Smart light would run the automation starting at midnight and was ignoring the timing I had specified. The solution to fix it was to delete the Smart Lighting automation and re-add it.
That work until recently. When the time of sunset +45 minutes could not be met (meaning there was not 45 minutes between sunset and 8:45 pm) it started turning on with all motion with the sensor.
Has anyone else noticed these problems recently? It seems Smartthings engineers are breaking things and we the consumer are having to find them and then live with them because they are not being fixed.
I have a separate issue with the battery status being removed from the CT101 thermostat. It has been broke for almost 3 months and they have no timeline for the known defect.
I don’t know about the DST midnight thing, but the Sunset+45 to 8:45pm thing sounds like the end time is being treated as 8:45pm the next day so it just seems like a time limit isn’t being applied. Assuming the end time is after the start time seems fair enough to me.
With automations as they are now, that period of time, (sunset or sunrise +/- X time “to” a fix time), cannot be scheduled.
If they remove smart lighting app they will have to add that possibility to automations, or to do that with automations, it could be done with 2 automations, (there is more options without virtual switch, but this is better for me):
First you have to create a virtual switch.
1st automation:
Turn “on” the virtual switch every day at 8:45 p.m. and add that it turns off 15 hours later, to ensure that it remains “on” until after sunrise.
2nd Automation:
IF part:
Period: Night (sunset + 45 minutes to sunraise)
“AND”
Yeah I am finding I can’t do the things with an automation that I am doing with the Smart lighting app. I am doing the following with 1 control:
check time is between sunset +45 mins and 9:00 pm
check if motion on sensor
if motion during the specified time turn on plug
Automations only allow time in:
specific time
sunrise/sunset + or - minutes, not until a specific time combination of sunset +45 and 9:00 pm
That is a bummer since I want the control to run much earlier in the evening in the winter and much later in the evening in the summer. That is why the combination in the Smart lighting works best.
I am not sure if your saying you think Smartthings handling of this time condition is correct or not. I personally do not think it is correct since they are completely ignoring the time condition and just turning the plug on every time there is motion rather than in the time window.
I would expect it to fail to turn the plug on if the time condition can’t be met since that condition would be false
.
I believe that smart lighting has always worked like this, when an end time is chosen less than the start time, as it is a continuous daily schedule, every day it will end at that set time and it will be activated again x time later. The automation works just the reverse of what is desired, it does not activate the light between sunset + 45 minutes and 20:45.
That said, looking at the smart lighting app live logging of the photo, every time a motion event occurs at any time of the day, it checks that all the programmed conditions are met and it has a “time windowStart” and Time WindowStop "and it seems which only check the Time WindowStop in this case.
This screenshot have same programming of yours, Madrid time is UTC +2h.
NOTE: To see the live logging of samart lighting app, how it works locally with local devices, you have to choose an automation that runs in the cloud. For this you have to choose a device that is not local in the automation you want to see.
You can also edit an automation device that is local and set the DTH version to “Draft”. That makes it run in cloud. Remember to change the DTH to Published version when you are done.
I had this working for over a year and then during 2021 DST it broke. The solution to fix it was to delete and add it back to the app. Then it broke again when there was not 45 minutes between sunset and the scheduled end time. Last year it just wouldn’t run once it hit that condition (what I would expect since one of the conditions is false). Instead Smartthings decided to ignore the time check part of the Smart lighting and turn on the device any time there was motion.
If you think it worked fine before, and according to the live login screenshot it doesn’t check the “Time WindowStart” properly, you should open a ticket to smartthins support to see what they say.
I have a ticket with support. They are still checking with development but I am expecting a similar response as the removal of the battery status for the CT1010 thermostat. They told me “this is a known issue” after several email exchanges asking for information to debug the issue. I am still waiting for that one to be fixed. It is really a pain to have to check the IDE to get the battery status % especially when it used to be easily visible in the app.
