I love the SmartThings platform. I feel it’s about time we start to talk about the next version of the hub. When you think about it the Home Automation industry makes it extremely easy to “jump ship”. The reliability, technical support, GUI, device integration, etc. play a major role in sticking with the Smartthings hub or moving all of your devices to a new platform. I used another platform before switching to Smartthings. I won’t mention the name of my prior platform but it became very unstable, I was constantly looking for answers. Smartthings is awesome. They are brand new but look how far they came and how quickly they did so. I have ideas of features i would like to see in the next version of the hub and I’m sure together we could get a solid list going of ideas that would impove the hardware considerably. ** Check out the Home Center Lite hub. That’s a great looking device. Gives big hopes to what could be possible with SmartThings version 2.0. What do you think? **

Related to this - I was having issues and found one of the articles on this site about wireless frequencies really helpful. Actually bought a more powerful router, moved things around in my house, hard-wired a ton more devices, and now things are working great. Regarding being able to debug wireless issues further - are there programs I can use to help understand this?

Yes, there are very sophisticated tools that can isolate these issues all the way down to which specific square foot of your home has what types of interference - however - unless you have significant experience driving theses tools the data is not very useful to the novice user. There are some simple guidelines that can be adhered to and from there most of the forensic testing that can be performed is virtually irrelevant - the solution, should you discover the “roots” of the problems, is the same. Here is some background and then I will share some “best practices” that usually will cure almost anyones’ home networking anxieties. First; keep in mind that WiFi (802.11b/g) runs at 2.4 GHz - so do Zigbee and Bluetooth. Add in an old cordless phone (if anyone still has one) and it is a guaranteed recipe for disaster under load - meaning even with “5 bars” on all devices once you start to run serious traffic across the wireless link the packet retries and interference will increase infinitum giving virtually no throughput and causing a horrible mess for the Zigbee devices also. Z-Wave is a much better player in the current home environment because it runs at 900 MHz. Again, old cordless phones run in this ISM band but there are very few of these left. So in short - Zwave plays nicer when 802.11 b/g are in the house. Now to exasperate that same situation throw 802.11n @ 2.4 GHz into the mix and add to the unpredictable results of everything. Here are “real life” experience recommendations and the “best” for a ST home friendly environment: Hardwire as many “bandwidth” intensive devices as possible - i.e. AppleTV, Sonos, any WebTV like thing, video game consoles, etc. If that is impossible then try to use ONLY 5.x GHz WiFi - 802.11a/h/n (you can usually select this option in your wireless access point / gateway / router configuration) this will “clean up” the air for Bluetooth and Zigbee. If you have to keep 2.4 WiFi for certain devices (Wemo is one) then use a separate access point if possible and limit the devices to only those that “have to have it” and keep them as low bandwidth devices. On that same note - stay away from WiFi extenders and if you have more than one access point (AP) in the home on 2.4 GHz make SURE that the different APs are on channels 1, 6, or 11. Any other configuration is guaranteed to cause doom and unpredictable results. Hope this helps everyone - trying to “survey” your home or pay someone to find the “WiFi” problems is not worth it. The recommendation will be the same as above.

[image] tgauchat: My ISP (Comcast) for example, gave me spotty service over a few weeks last year Speaking of the devil (Comca$t), I’ve endured 5 hours of Internet outage today. Needless to say, my “smart” home became totally dumb in an instant. Fortunately, I don’t use SmartThings for anything “mission critical”, but these are the times when you realize that you should not take always-on Internet for granted. My Philips Hues stills worked though, which proves how important the local processing is from the user experience standpoint.

[image] cooperglee: Hope this helps everyone - trying to “survey” your home or pay someone to find the “WiFi” problems is not worth it. The recommendation will be the same as above. Thanks, this is super helpful!

[image] geko: My Philips Hues stills worked though, which proves how important the local processing is from the user experience standpoint. Sorry to hear of your outage, though hopefully not too common for any of us. Being without the internet is bad enough without having to be stuck in the dark or even locked out… One poster mentioned that the mobile apps should probably always run from the cloud… The Hue Bridge is a good example of cloud independence even for UI access, as the hub itself runs a local http / REST-API server that can satisfy most client requests. The cloud is only used for “scene” sharing and for access from outside your LAN. So that begs the question of Hub Version 2.0: Can it, possibly, please, serve a user interface (or client API) as well? One way to handle this is for the Hub 2.0 to serve an HTML5 version of the UI, thus killing two birds with one stone. I think the brilliant folks at SmartThings could make it seamlessly determine how to draw screens using local objects first (like a CDN cache), only going to the cloud (when the cloud is available) to update the cache as new tiles and icons, etc., are added. …CP / Terry.

[image] Shepstyle: Thanks, this is super helpful! Few more tips here: http://community.smartthings.com/t/home-networking-tips

It appears from some analysis that @Tyler did yesterday that my problem lies in z-wave land, not zigbee, LAN, Cloud or ISP. In one instance captured in the logs there was a 15 second hiatus between the hub sending a setLevel command (after the roundtrip to the cloud) and the lights actually turning on. So one possibility is that one of my z-wave devices is faulty and somehow drags the z-wave network down. Next challenge will be to find such a device. I have over 65 z-wave dimmers and switches, so it’s certainly possible there’s a bad apple. It’s not clear how to find it though!!

Don’t know if anyone else watched the Developer Discussion from 1/14/2015 and what your opinion was… any little hope I had of being warm and fuzzy about the V2 Hub was quickly extinguished. The meeting had a tone of a bunch of SmartThings employees who don’t talk, collaborate or have a clue where the company is going. Wow, just feeling completely deflated about any future for SmartThings. For those of us with HomeBrew Automation Systems looking to use a hub with our homebrew, I think SmartThings is out the window. Time for some research on other hubs.

[image] JerseyTechGuy: Wow, just feeling completely deflated… To share my own personal opinion bluntly: You just aren’t SmartThings’s primary target market. Openness for general development is a side-effect of them being open for significant partnerships or demanded integrations; ie, for example, they would rewrite major chunks of the system and move mountains to get Nest integration, but various other development requirements and wishlists must take a backseat to STs #1 priority: mass consumer market (with Samsung doing some behind the scenes pushing too, of course). The optimistic view is that a strong and successful consumer presence (helped in no small part by major partnerships) will give ST more resources to both stabilize the product and accommodate less visible features that are valuable to you and many of us here in the same boat. Just IMHO. Overall, I think they are juggling and growing pretty well at the moment, considering how quickly the industry is changing and the challenges & opportunities of becoming a part of Samsung. I can’t say if that’s a consensus, but many in the Community feel ST is the best “live” choice… The competition is either old, even less featured and responsive to us, or too new to tell (or vaporware, Kickware, Indieware). Respectfully, … Terry.

[image] JerseyTechGuy: any little hope I had of being warm and fuzzy about the V2 Hub was quickly extinguished. I’ve got an impression that V2 feature set is not even fully defined yet. There was too much hand waving and guessing about the product that’s supposed to hit the store shelves in 3 month. That’s not a good sign. :frowning: Battery backup has a questionable value, IMHO, because the batteries are not rechargeable and the AA batteries will only last an hour or so. You still need a backup power to run your Internet router and cable/DSL modem, so what’s the point? I’d rather have a WiFi because that would allow me to locate the hub in the best location without running long Ethernet cable or easily bring it closer to devices when including them into Z-Wave network.

SmartThings Hub Version 2.0

Devices & Integrations

Mike_Maxwell (Mike Maxwell) January 16, 2015, 1:37pm 221

Few more tips here:
http://community.smartthings.com/t/home-networking-tips

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SmartThings Hub Version 2.0

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