As a new user its very frustrating to realize how terrible hello home is with regards to automating. You can’t even automate more than one thermostat for Hello Home. I had to install thermostat programming app just so I could run a 5/2 or 7 day program. Those kinds of apps should be installed by default on any home automation system.
Buying the hardware and turning a switch off and on is cool. But once you get beyond that, there isn’t much you can do out of the box without diving deep into custom apps and device types.
Many times. There are still issues with it, and z-wave network repairs take about 45 minutes. Z-wave network repair is a black box, doesn’t tell you much. It would be nice to have a good z-wave utility that allowed more diagnostics and repair capabilities.
We all see very different behavior. I have 55 devices out of which 15 - 20 devices are powered zwaves. It takes couple of seconds for the zwave repair to complete. You can never see the state of repair except for in the live logs where it says it started and finished after a while. No clue as to what exactly happened in the repair process.
The zwave devices are:
1 Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave Range Extender/Repeater
1 Aeon Labs DSC11-ZWUS Z-Wave Gen 5 siren for indoors (ZW080-A17)- US freq.
Hi @bravenel, my repair process for 100+ AC powered devices takes roughly 12 to 15 minutes, and as quick as 9 minutes. The few times mine has gone as long as yours was due to the devices not responding and/or updating mesh info. The root cause for me has always been an excluded device by force and the clean up needed, a completely failed device (only 1 so far), or a couple devices just deciding they needed a full power cycle to wake up.
I too wish there was some type of mesh network “viewer” so I could see the communications health of a device so I can proactively get them fixed instead of waiting for ST to start acting up.
@alex
How much effort does it take to fix auto-lock that’s been broken since day 1? A door that is setup with the stock dashboard app to unlock on arrival will remain open unless it’s open and then closed. It remains open indefinetly if I enter through a different door or if my phone decides to teleport in the middle of the night.
How much effort does it take to put labels of device tiles?
I have 6 devices that don’t exist, most likely all from forced deletes. I’d love some way to clean them up. I’m fairly sure they have something to do with why it takes so long to run a repair. Support said they can’t clean it up, so I’m stuck.
Any idea how to get rid of these old deleted devices?
@geko yeah I know of apples large following and that is why I say smart things gotta step their game up. Loyal customers, apple has in spades and apple is typically the trend setter in marketplace. That is why I see their release of homekit crucial because puts pressure on smart things and “if apple flops” or the doesn’t deliver the kind of ha experience the masses are interested in then I can possibly see smart things pulling ahead. All I know is I am excited for 2015 to see what happens.
All fair. For what it’s worth, we see Homekit as something we’ll integrate extensively with versus simply competition. There will be tons of innovation in the space, and our open model will prioritize customers and avoiding unnatural lock-ins first and foremost.
And in terms of scale, have no doubts about our resolve and Samsung’s broader capabilities as the largest worldwide manufacturer of smart phones and TVs, the fastest growing manufacturer of appliances, and many more things. It will be a fun year ahead!
Will comment on a broader thread about this in a moment, but for locks they have gotten far better (particularly the latest Schlage and Kwikset ones) at accurately reporting state in the past year. Have you tried removing it from the network and re-pairing it in recent months?
On device tile labels, that’s been quite the debate internally over time. Right now Dashboard based tiles do have labels, and in the Thing view you can use icons, groups with custom photos, and shake the phone to temporarily display labels. Have you tried those approaches? Screenshots of my own setup below.
The entire discrepancy between the Thing view and Dashboard views is getting thought through right now, so this input will be incorporated.
Agreed with you, @bravenel, @johnconstantelo and others. We are planning better utilities in the coming months. As advanced users ourselves (I have 125+ Z-wave devices myself) we feel and see the need. Happy to say this will get better in the future as more device selection becomes available with Zigbee and Thread protocols which are superior.
@alex We are with you and wish nothing but the best for ST. We feel equally passionate. All the best and Good Luck. Thanks for sharing at a personal level.
Hello, Home handles switches, dimmers, locks, multiple thermostats for me. Along with automated, pattern based Mode changes that cause other apps and behaviors to respond as configured in the Dashboard modules, it can do a bunch without custom apps and device types. I think one of our key issues is making all that easier to discover and get comfortable with.
Let me know what you’re trying to do specifically and I’ll make explicit suggestions.
Wrt thermostats, we’ll also do much better with those soon with scheduling tools and explicit Dashboard support (vs. just Hello, Home and Thing views). We can give more specific details on those plans following CES.
@alex The problem with this approach is the Dashboard is not flexible enough. It groups things like Sonos under Switches and doesn’t allow me to categorize the way I want them to be done. That is why “Things” is popular as we have the flexibility to group things the way we want. However, the downside of things is now you can’t use custom icons for your devices and can’t see their names without shaking the phone. It’s a catch 22. Neither the Dashboard, nor Things menu completely gives the user flexibility to make the look and feeling to their liking.
This is not about reporting state of a lock, the sate is reported correctly (mostly). This is about the software not auto-locking a lock if associated door has not been opened and then closed. Support acknowledged that this is an existing known issue, but it has never been fixed since I got into ST (8 months ago).
Yes, there are workarounds, custom apps, etc, but it doesn’t work correctly out of the box!
Lock control was the primary reason for me to get into HA. Certain people in my family always left doors unlocked.
Eventually HA evolved into a passionate hobby and I want ST to grow and prosper. I invested too much into ST, more time than money and I really want you to succeed. However it still bothers me that the original purpose of ST is not fulfilled for me!
Thanks Alex. I rebuilt my Goodbye! event and was able to add both thermostats to it for away and home modes. Thank you for the reply so i looked futher into the issue. I feel the hello home features are amazing built in smartapps, but it took me a few days of clicking icons before I even found that functionality.
I hope you do address device descriptions on the tiles though, because looking at your own dashboard you have two temperature readings of 69 degrees in your things folder, but you have to shake your phone to show exactly what thing that is. I don’t want to be shaking my 500 dollar phone, to show a label on my “thing”.
SUPER helpful to have those examples, and great fuel for improvements we can make. I get the sense that there are many things that are perhaps too difficult to find in the app, which have caused the community to discover funky workarounds, and then others replicate those workarounds and on and on in a bad cycle. Thank you for your comments.
For your specific 2 examples, here would be my advice:
For Christmas tree lights - check out Hello, Home and phrases. Configure to turn them on when you wake up with Good Morning, turn them off when you say Goodbye (leave for work or whatever), turn then on when you return home with “I’m Home”, and off when you say “Goodnight”. You can set these modes to trigger automatically based on a schedule, when you leave or return home, when there is no motion for a period of time, or whatever.
In my case, my Xmas lights (and similar for many others) turn on in the morning automatically when “Good Morning” gets triggered when anyone walks downstairs and triggers any 1st floor motion sensors after 6 AM. The lights turn off when the house says “Goodbye” automatically when my wife and I are both out (via presence tag and mobile phone geofence). They turn on automatically when we come home and house senses our presence and says “I’m Back”. At night they turn off automatically when the house says “Good Night” automatically whenever there is no motion for 15 minutes on any of the 1st floor motion sensors after 11 PM. 100% done with Hello, Home and feels magical.
For #2 and your basement lights, we should certainly get dimming into the Lights and Switches module (silly that we don’t). For now, you could create custom phrases in Hello, Home that don’t trigger a Mode change but rather just set a range of dimmers the way you’d like them to be set. As an example, in my house “Good Morning” sets all of the main living area lights on and dimmed to 100%, and “Kids Bedtime” turns many off while setting some specific bulbs and dimmers to 30%, and “Movie Time” dims them a specific way, etc.
With regard to Modes, keep in mind also that you can have apps that only run when you are already in a certain Mode. So my lighting examples might only run that way while I’m at home, but when I’m away on Vacation (a custom Mode I set up) none of that stuff happens and instead the house uses random lighting schedules to make it appear like we are at home while also running a bunch of security related apps.
I see. So you’d like an option that simply locks a lock if it has been unlocked for a specific period of time, whether or not the associated door was opened as part of the process? That’s a simple and good suggestion.
For now, it might work to create a Hello, Home phrase that triggers whenever things quiet down in the house (no motion for xx minutes on one or more motion sensors) that locks any and all locks that are open. I think that would fix you up as an interim workaround that isn’t too messy.
I also get the broader point loud and clear that it feels like these suggestions go into a cauldron and then sit there for a long time. We’re building a direct app development team and also better testing and approval resource pools to help that happen much more quickly and reliably in the future!
