Smart Lighting App not so smart

This app is very buggy.
-Setup a light switch to turn on at sunset and turn off at sunrise. That is all specified for that automation. This does not work at all. The switch will not turn on at sunset, and if the switch is turned on manually, it will no get turned off at sunrise.

-Setup a light switch to turn on when a StartThings motion detector detects movement and turn off 3 minutes after no movement is detected. This should happen only when in Home mode. This is very buggy, the home mode is not honored all the time and the light turns on when the house is in Night mode. This is hard to reproduce, but it happens every night. The motion detector is in the master bedroom, so it is not fun when the lights get turned on in the middle of the night.

Support ticket opened.

We’ve been having reliability issues with sunrise/sunset scheduled events for many months.

I am also seeing modes not being respected in SmartApps on a daily basis.

I wonder if you are both using “Arrival Sensors” and/or cell presence.

I gave up on cell presence (may be specifically bad with Samsung S3), and added redundant Arrival Sensor (fobs) in the cars and keys, and longer fob departure delays, and a zigbee motion sensor to repeat from garage.

Now modes are mostly ok. I don’t use sunset sunrise for anything - that’s peak usage time that loses scheduled events . Maybe a local photocell switch would be a more usable sunrise/sunset signal.

It’s a workaround.

Here they are not. Motion sensor SmartApps set only for sleeping mode go off numerous times daily. Nothing sets this mode but a hard timed “automatically perform” attached to the ‘sleeping’ routine. These triggers occur in ‘Home’ mode, and that mode has been verified before and after the actions.

Similarly, I have another motion sensor set to turn on lights only if the garage door is closed. This is no longer working reliably as well.

SmartThings is clearly having trouble with accurate ‘state’ information for not only modes, but other devices as well.

Not at all. Modes are not honored 100% of the time and sunset sunrise actions were working perfectly until I migrated to the v2 hub.

I am unable to edit one of the lighting automations I created in Smart Lighting. It says I am not authorized to perform the requested operation. The rest I can open and edit fine.

Add one to Smart Lighting not turning on at sunset and off at sunrise. Also, if you enable it to turn off at sunrise, the offset in minutes says “Sunset offset in minutes” under the toggle, not “Sunrise offset in minutes”. I am using ST app on iOS 9 and I have hub v2.

Known issue and has been reported! :wink: report to support though, please to bump up the priority!

“Smart” Lighting is broken again. I set up a rule to turn on dimmer to 50% when motion is detected. It’s been working just fine for over a month, until today. Now, whenever motion is detected, the dimmer always turns to 100%. I have not made any changes to my configuration recently. Why can’t they just live it alone and stop messing with the god damned thing?

1 Like

Because they are lacking in engineering discipline, and evidently don’t know how to test their own software. This bug is well known, and as @slagle says, it’s fix is “code complete”. Whoopee! I guess that means someday they will release the code, and break something else when they do, since the only thing they will test is dimLevel. Snarky, but true.

1 Like

Support told me they’re aware of a bug that affects automations running locally. The thing is, this particular automation is not.

Also, the “Not-So-Smart Lighting” app is actually pretty dumb. Not only, it turns the light to 100%, it actually re-triggres it on every motion event. So even if I adjust it to say 30%, it will turn it back to 100% in a minute or so, while I’m in the room. How smart is that?

1 Like

@Geko, does that sound like they are on top of it? Or what??? :grinning:

Has it been fixed and I just missed it? Phwhoa
I wasn’t able to set dim levels with Smart Light since day one.

Except when it needs to, like when timer goes off but motion is still occurring


Seriously? They can’t input a dimmer level and then do a setLevel with that value? And, they can’t properly deal with motion.inactive events? Why not? These are very simple automations. How long has this app been in the wild now?

Chalk up another issue. The “Toggle on & off” option when using a button controller to trigger Smart Lighting does nothing. No matter what you choose, the first press fires the programmed action and the 2nd press does the opposite.

Say you have a 4 button remote set so 1 = 100% dim, 2 = 50% dim, 3 = 10% dim, 4 = off. Press 1 it goes to 100%. Press 3 it goes to 10%. Press 1 again and
off() is sent. Now that it’s off, press 3 and you get no response because it also wants to send off(). (Reported to ST, but thought I’d share)

5 Likes

BTW, this is still broken. Reported it to support more than two month ago!

Is there any timeline on when these issues will be resolved. With this app being our only option for local processing these problems are a huge inconvenience.

Are you sure it hasn’t been fixed? I’m using sunset -30 to turn on a GE plugin receptacle and it has been firing as it should. I turn it off at a specific time, so I’m not sure about sunrise triggers.

I had immediate success with Smartthings’ Security smart apps controlling outlets upon motion detection, but also could not never get the Smart Lighting app to do the same.

Last thing I tried was going to https://graph.api.smartthings.com/installedSmartApp/list and deleting a couple “orphaned” instances of my previous Security smartapps that were showing up here but weren’t appearing on my SmartThings app on my phone 
 and then the Smart Lighting suddenly worked. Perhaps there was some conflict between multiple smartapp instances controlling the same devices (although all of them should’ve had the same goal: turn on the outlet upon motion), or maybe it was the fact that orphaned instances existed.

I don’t have anything crazy running with this app, mostly simple on/off of lights based on a door sensor and after dark. One thing I did notice tonight was if you set a light to come on when a status changes and select the “Also turn off when mode changes back”, it will not actually turn the lights back off when the mode changes back. This was mildly annoying because I had to create a second automation to handle turning the lights back off, when the first one should have been enough.