Currently clocking in with over 110 devices, half of which are zwave, I’ve not seen an increase in device latency in relation to device count. If anything, ST has gotten snappier over the past month.
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Similar scenario here.
Zwave is designed for low traffic, tiny message networks of up to 250 devices. The assumption is that most of the devices sleep most of the time, or at least are inactive from a network messaging standpoint. In fact this is exactly why the concept of message relaying works: most devices aren’t busy, so they can happily pass on messages for other devices. (Only mains-powered devices act as repeaters, though, not battery-powered devices.)
If you have a network of nothing but battery powered devices then, yes, things might slow down as you go over a dozen or so as the hub itself might get overwhelmed. A more typical mix would be one repeating device for every 5 battery operated devices if do, and then the mesh would actually get stronger as more devices are added and more alternate routing paths become available.
Then there’s the traffic issue. Zwave is not intended for real time monitoring, but rather sampling. A typical zwave motion sensor, for example, likely is set by the factory to sleep most of the time, and wake up every 4 or 8 minutes to see if anything is going on. Then if the delta change reaches their reporting threshhold, they send the report and go back to sleep. Low traffic, tiny messages.
If instead you crank the sensitivity up very high, or you shorten the sleep interval, or you poll the devices all the time, you can vastly increase the amount of traffic on the network. Then anything might slow down unpredictably.
And finally there’s the range issue. If a device is almost but not quite out of range then it can have a hard time getting messages through. And again, not enough repeaters can make the problem worse.
So there will be some homes with 200 zwave devices, low traffic, repeaters in the right places, and everything ticking along beautifully.
And there will be other homes with 7 devices, high traffic, no repeaters, and messages getting delayed or lost.
“All home automation is local” 
Support may be able to help diagnose signal strength or traffic if you’re concerned about network performance.
Bump! Any updates on this, I know the data had been more targeted for Q3, but is there any other updates?
Apple is coming out w/ their Apple TV update announcement in less than week, and if there isn’t more excitement about the Hub v2, I’m afraid we are going to lose a lot of people in the ST environment.
I was just wondering.
While I share your excitement for V2, I seriously doubt ST users (or any one else for that matter) are going to abandon all their zwave and zigbee devices in order to join in the homekit frenzy…
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Mike I am now +100 and much are ZWave…and other than an odd scheduled time miss, its all pretty snappy. I don’t think the increase in devices is a huge roadblock at these numbers.
What I had configured apps to be doing, did.
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TLDR; Apple TV is not a hub meant to tie all of your devices together.
From Apple:
The Apple TV is acting as an intermediary when you’re issuing Siri voice commands to your home from a remote location, but the company says the device is less of a “hub” meant to tie all of your devices together and more of an entry point to your local network.
Ah, I don’t think people will abandon all of their Zwave or Zigbee devices, but I know people who aren’t invested in HA are waiting and going to see. If Apple TV connects well w/ Hue & WeMo then people could push more towards devices connecting via Wifi.
I don’t think the current early adopters here will abandon it, but I know of at least 3 people I work with who would have invested in ST by now, but are waiting. This is a critical period in grabbing market share very early, and if too many people go the easy route and just rely on Apple then with fewer ST users and Zwave/Zigbee device buyers the prices won’t go down and we may lose developers in this community who move over supporting HomeKit and Apple which has a proven app store.
Patiently waiting for the hub 2.0. I’ve built out 60+ devices to smartthings, and it works better than any x10 system I’ve had before. the limitations of a cloud required internet connection and latency, no battery backup, and terrible zigbee range is really killing the experience for me. Every day for the past few months, I get the complaints from her, my gadgets aren’t working, schedules don’t always run. Why does the mailbox say we have mail every time we sneeze, etc. Door sensors to turn on stairway lights, Variable internet delay from 1 second to 30 seconds or more, you’re already done tripping down the stairs in the dark. And the trigger conflicts from the delays. Lights on triggering after the lights off, from door sensors triggers responding async, out of order. I am hopeful for the Samsung Smartcam official integration. The developer codes, I can never get them to stay working more than 2-3 days before everything breaks. oh, and why oh why does the smart things multisensor use expensive short life AAAA camera batteries? I didn’t realize battery life drops significantly every few feet. 10 feet away, same batteries last a month, 40 feet away, new batteries every 7-10 days. I’m going to figure out how to solder AA’s into them. Either zigbee is just awful in 2.4ghz congestion, or we need the ability to add external 2.4ghz antennas to the hub. I replaced most with zwave, which has great range.
Hmm…
The multisensor on my front door is still running on the original set of batteries that came with it from SmartThings - that’s over seven months now and still going strong.
I’m in a large multi-storey apartment building, so the 2.4GHz environment is very busy here.
Is it possible you’re polling them excessively using a smartapp such as Pollster, or similar? Or are they located somewhere very cold (outdoors?)? Either of those would explain the poor battery life.
Same here. I just replaced mine for the first time on my most used sensor… Lasted 1.5 years
I use the smart things multi + graph device type on them. The only smart app was mailbox for the one. Laundry done for the other.
The original batteries in the smart things multi sensor lasted about 1 week. They came with only 88% battery life left. I purchased a bunch of Duracell Ultra AAAA’s, and it eats those up too. 100% signal, rssi -69dbm. 1% battery left, looks like I have to go replace them again. With fresh batteries, the app shows 100% battery, so the batteries don’t appear to be bad. Temperature doesn’t seem to change the life expectancy more than a day or so. In the winter mid 40’s is the same as the spring mid 80’s on life expectancy. The laundry machine is indoors with constant temp and humidity, yet it dies quickly too. I do have another less than 10 feet from the hub, and that is still on it’s first set of batteries. One thing I haven’t tried is placing the hub farther from my wifi. I have the hub connected to the same battery backup, and hub as my computer, so it’s within a couple feet. I should experiment with a long cable, and just take it off the battery backup for now. I’ll report back how that works out.
Just out of curiosity, what channel is your zigbee radio in the ST hub on?
I don’t think you can ever underestimate Apple fans and how crazy they get over anything Apple makes. I don’t doubt one bit that people will jump ship no matter how unjustified or poorly informed the decision is.
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I’m one of those people 
. Though it would be nice if Smartthings and Homekit played nice. It will be interesting to see what Apple has to say next week about it.
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Been out of the loop for a number of months now. Life just sorta took over, ya know? Anyway, what’s the latest on Hub 2.0? Just wondering if there’s been any new discussion on it or any sort of eta?
Last I heard it was going to be release when it was ready, and not before. But there was some rumblings that it might be by the end of this summerish.
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Welcome back!
Your “rumblings” are the same that I am aware of. Note that migration tools are not likely in this time frame.
I’ve been looking into this system, too. Appears that you can connect via IP by using a PC as the controller, but if you want to do z-wave or the other protocols, you either need a dongle for your PC (z-wave stick, for example) or you can run it on a single board computer like a Rasberry Pi 2 with the proper controller add-on boards attached. I’m not a coder or a Pi user, so I’m a little fuzzy on the whole thing, but I was thinking about getting a z-wave stick and messing around with it running from my PC.
Also - though they don’t currently support zigbee, it appears that at least some of their people are trying to figure it out.
Also, also - They’re working on a parallel 2.0 build that is supposed to clean up the software to make it run faster and make it easier to use for non-coders like myself.
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Hopefully this means good things for a near V2 release. Had I known how long it was going to be until V2 release, I probably would have purchased V1 back in Jan. Still patiently waiting though…
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They’re now saying Q3. I’m sure it’s probably an inventory reduction method.