Ok Firstly let me start by saying this is not me trying to slam SmartThings, and as a developer myself I totally get teething problems with new features etc. But this system, at least in the UK is being sold as a product, currently that product isn’t functioning anywhere near as advertised.
Firstly the Presence sensor that comes in the starter pack didn’t work, now thats something you can buy on its own, and it didnt even detect when you were away, and this took at least a month to fix.
While that was happening my routines that are triggered by time stopped working, now it seems to add a second to the next run instead of adding 1 day to the next run (hence not triggering after the first time)… how on earth has that mistake been made?
And now comes the point where the Presence sensor is fixed, but instead the security feature now spams the hell out of you with security alerts… when the security is set to disarmed, and it takes a lot of fiddling to get it to stop.
There is so many ideas I have to use SmartThings, and to do them costs a hell of a lot of money for all the extra sensors and devices that will work with SmartThings, but before I can justify it to myself the basics need to work, and I just can’t see the light at the end of this seemingly long tunnel. The guy that I seem to deal with a lot on support email is great but the engineering team need to sort this out, this isn’t some sort of beta test.
If anyone has more information on why we seem to get so many issues/When they might be fixed/Are they going to be fixed(the amount of issues im wondering if this endevour is going to give up?)/and if there are any basics going wrong for yourself post them here.
I feel your pain…IMHO most of this unreliability came when SmartThings migrated to their new Hub V2 platform and everything that we existing V1 users had that was working perfectly started to go haywire. The V2 migration, if you can call deleting everything and starting over from scratch was a nightmare in itself. We were promised local hub processing capabilities, bypassing the cloud issues, which have not been delivered as expected.
I see no light at the end of a tunnel and I have been run over repeatedly by random trains as I look for light.
For now, I have removed much of my critical devices from alerting me, since I cannot trust that they are reporting correctly, or that when things happen that I am getting alerts.
It’s a sad day for now, and we can only hope that SmartThings can get their once great act back together again.
Thanks for pointing out the +1 second error on scheduled events I had observed the failures but hadn’t tied the two together It seems to occur when an event is processed and completes a few seconds or so before the due time. It looks like ST is trying to get over the peaks in demand by processing early and not having a fail safe it is too quick.
But I would agree ST is not stable especially on timed events and presence sensors.
And why does any fix always involve removing apps/routines/devices and then re-adding them?
however ST is still the best of the current generation at what it does due to its flexibility at a reasonable cost. But reliability would help.
as for the presence sensor unreliability you should look at my modified device type which disallows a state transiation when already in that state… ie will not say your are home when last state was already home
Thanks guys for your thoughts and opinions, its great to know im not alone in this home automation hunt.
This was my thinking when i started this post, The system is for home automation, yet I seem to be manually triggering events more than autonomous events are taking place, not because I cant put the rules together or use the right apps but because things dont fire, or dont trigger correctly, and then require manual intervention.
I have never had a V1 Hub, it sounds like that was a good system, sadly I joined the home automation dream just when the preverbial hit the fan. I honestly hope it gets back there, my worst fear is that with so many issues, some of them quite fundemental and taking so long to fix, is that they end up saying you know what, its crashed and burned, sorry guys lets pack up and all go home.
no i have been using it for a month or two with no issues the prersence sensors work fine when i leave or return… you will see the following message regulary in the logs if you look when it is reject a state change when uncalled for.
log.info “Found last state = $state.lastState… same new state = $value … Ignoring!”
this stops random … so and so has arrived state changes when you were already home, and unwanted triggering of routines or devices.
Dont know why they dont build it in or integrate my changegs but they have not even looked at any of the updated device types, smart apps or anything i have choosen to share with them.
actually after insntalling new device type … go into each device in the app click modify/save
Thanks for the productive post… I thought it was very funny too when people say V1hub was better than what I have, it sounds better… makes sense no? I guess I would know more if you actually elaborated on why you found that comment so funny.
I long ago gave up on the presence sensor. A nice idea, too bad it doesn’t work well. I would have the sensor sitting on my keyring 15 feet from the hub and through the nite it would change its status from home to away and back.
There is so many ideas I have to use SmartThings, and to do them costs a hell of a lot of money for all the extra sensors and devices that will work with SmartThings
I am a fan of the ST system, it gives me the ability to monitor for motion and leaks at a price that was not affordable before. But if you are considering adding anything that affects the fundamental security of your home such as door locks or garage door openers I would strongly suggest thinking about the consequences of a mis-function such as falsely detecting that you have left and returned.
This is exactly what I would ideally like, but as you say with all the mishaps going on its not so trust worthy, luckily i seem to be one of a small portion that (since an update about two weeks ago) has a presence sensor that works fine so, but things such as the unscheduled forced updates that they do like recently that required me to repair my presence sensor and things not firing mean I have to really put my dreams of hardcore home automation on hold. I just hope the engineers of the system keep strong and fix all the issues and dont see it as a slow bleeding but fatal wound and give up on it altogether.
