Suggested Improvement to Reboot "Offline" Hubs that are inaccessible

Tell me about it, right?

I can’t resist this tangent, though… Don’t get me started!

I have a Samsung microwave oven. It has a dozen pre-programmed settings for popcorn, frozen pizza, defrost, etc., etc., but really all I use is timed cook and perhaps the power-level option.

But it also has a half-dozen configuration parameters like keypad beep, reminder mode, 24 hour clock vs AM/PM, daylight savings on/off, metric/imperial (for weight based defrosting), and, of course, set the clock.

My complaint? All of these static config parameters are in volatile RAM … i.e., they are all lost when there is even a brief power outage. Gee, practically any $3.00 MCU or supporting chip has several (kilo)bytes of NVRAM that could retain these simple binary! settings of all the custom configuration items (except the real-time clock), no battery required. Then after a power outage, all that would need resetting is the clock … not 6+ other parameters via the cumbersome menu. In fact, a coin-cell battery backed extremely accurate real-time clock chip would likely outlast the lifetime of the oven and super impress Customers! :confounded:

Engineers don’t live in the real world, I guess … or somebody wouldn’t pony up the $3 chip per unit? Dunno. Ironic that it is a Samsung appliance though!

And then there’s my LG Washer and Dryer than have a dozen custom wash and dry cycles each. Yet the majority of them do not allow any tweaking (or remember my tweaks). Towels don’t dry sufficiently on the “Cottons” setting, but the “Towels” setting uses High heat – which is contrary to the cleaning label instructions. If I select “Towels” … I can’t change the temperature. So I always end up using the “wrong” overall setting, or just switch to plain old “timed dry” – select temperature, select time; and thus lose the automatic dryness shutoff feature and waste energy. :confounded:

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I wish I could say I didn’t laugh, but this is without a doubt my experience as well. You’re absolutely right, there are quite a many engineer smarter than any of us that come up with amazing things; yet still they miss the mark. This is why you lock the really eccentric ones in a room and throw a pizza under the door twice a day.

You perfectly describe the state of HA technology. Working in IT, we all so easily get caught up in expecting rapid development, and then you go and try to run the washer and hello Star Trek. It’s nice to have options, but I wonder whether our current implementation approach is misguided.

As an example, I grew up in the 80s. I was an Atari 2600 kid. For companies it was all the rage; General Mills made Rice Krispies, and started a game development division, US Games if I remember right. I shouldn’t have to say more, though to be honest their games weren’t the worst out there.

We just bought a new range and microwave, first time in 15 years. The range and microwave pair over Bluetooth. So you turn on a burner, the light on the microwave comes on.

My favorite feature? They sync their clocks. Spouse approval factor: 100%.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Clare Booth Luce, paraphrased

A sentiment all companies should consider during design, still it’s not an excuse to dumb down your product line. Real-world usage is key no matter whether hardware is the new software or you’re “disrupting” an existing industry. Cheers.

Sure… convenient … but has the primary purpose of the appliance been compromised in any way?

The picture below is what my friend faced as he was about to start roasting his Thanksgiving turkey…

Customer service was no help. The mechanics of the oven were probably fine… heck, humans have used pits in the ground filled with hot rocks as ovens for thousands of years before even the spring-loaded thermostat was invented.

This type of situation – a basic appliance being disabled solely due to an electronic or software error is going to cause the end of civilization. All those doomsday warnings of EMP weapons or cyber attacks on the power grid are quite justified.

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No, not here, we went with GE. Not that they’re a panache, but I do appreciate their incremental approach as opposed to Whirlpool. We like our KitchenAid (Whirlpool) refrigerator, time will tell about the ice maker. That’s always the thing that goes on me. GE Appliances may be gobbled up by Electrolux, but so far it’s been good. Had a great experience with GE Appliances tech support when I web enabled our hybrid water heater; totally surprised me. Hopefully they keep it up - one call resolution in 2015 to enable smartphone control for the water heater we bought in 2014. Frankly that’s the best thing we bought so far, the hybrid water heater reduced our electric bill by $40-50 a month on average, so significant.

After resolving some delivery problems we’re satisfied with the combo in the kitchen, basement, and laundry. Maytag (Whirlpool) dishwasher, washer, and dryer; GE water heater, range, microwave; LG second fridge and Frigidaire (Whirlpool) freezer in the basement. Thus far so good, we like to pick best of breed when we can. I don’t need everything connected, for example I don’t use SmartThings for home alarm system, we have a pre-existing Honeywell system. Something critical like that needs the appropriate UL certification, e.g. for me it needs to just work every time, all the time.

LG is the worst. Ordered the secondary fridge, took one month delivery. Ice maker line was damaged upon arrival. Couldn’t get a replacement immediately afterwards. Shame. Nice service techs, tracking process could be better.

I’ll be the first to post to post if there’s a problem with the new GE stuff, but so far it’s been good. Their approach seems to be conservative with IoT. I’m okay with that, we don’t have the need to remotely actuate the stove at this point, though GE has a model that does that.

We have a whole house surge suppression device, but I’ve also been putting Leviton surge suppression outlets on all 120v appliances as a second line of defense. My reasoning is that modern appliances all have PCBs and <$20 each receptacle is a small burden, as long as the surge fails open and I inspect them at least once a year.

Network, core compute resources, and ST are all behind APC Smart-UPS units with Net management cards; home theater gear is behind APC line conditioners.

So to answer the question, if primary functionality was absent, it gets removed at the supplier’s expense. I can be reasonably persuasive the few times it’s come down to it. :smile:

My suggestion posted elsewhere

  1. rest api on hub for local network “reboot” command
  2. hub self-reboot after X minutes without connection to the mother ship.

Either/both, but esp #2, would fix the “hub down, needs to be rebooted” issue which usually means no HA until a monkey can throw a switch. And sometimes, the monkey isn’t going to be there for a while.

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Very good suggestions on this post and maybe…just maybe ST staffs are listening on some of the advice. My other house is 5 hours away and it’s still offline. Telling my non tech dad to go over and do a reset is harder than going to Mars.

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Or just give us access to telnet again and reveal the passwords so we can simply telnet in and issue “sudo shutdown now -r”

although I have other reasons for wanting telnet access and root access to my hub. Mostly for getting away from cloud processing and setting up my own using a common scripting/programming language.

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I’m one of those folks who has two hubs, and one of them monitors a remote location 2.5 hours away.

Now, most of us here are relatively early adopters, and likely represent the family IT department. We are likely to be annoyed at things like this, but somewhat forgiving. Unfortunately, many of use also have family members (“business users”) who have little patience for technology to begin with, and no tolerance at all for dramatic failures. They often exert at least partial budget control. This makes these hidden stakeholders very important for purveyors of home technology.

So my first thought when I saw the outage warnings was “how on earth am I going to explain needing to make a 5 hour round trip (+ 5 minutes to do the reset) during family time, to fix a problem that my wife doesn’t care about?”. Fortunately for me, my remote location still has a V1 hub and was not impacted this time.

All of this is to reinforce the urgency of avoiding situations like this again. Otherwise the “business users” are likely to severely curtail the ability of us IT folks to spend money on what they see as expensive toys.

Regards,
Pavlik (another IT consultant)

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ya…
my wife was not too happy when I though I was going to have to make an 8-9 hour plane flight each way, and lose 2-3 days to fix the issue. But without monitoringI don’t know the temp in the house or if there is a water leak/burst pipe because no heat etc. And You cannot rely on my parents neighbors to go over ever day and check the house.

I tried to make the system as fool proof as I can with wifi switch to backup the hub etc.
I will be looking into 3g/4g router backup as well when I am up there this summer. But my time to install and configure the initial system was limited to a 3 day visit… I think I did pretty good with 2 door locks, 5 motion detectors, 6 or 7 door sensors, water sensors in each bathrrom, kitchen, laundry room, and basement not to mention whole house water valve control and
5 in floor ct100 thermostats and 1 Honeywell wifi thermostat and a few lights and switches… in a long weekend.

I also got vpn access working on the router and got dd-wrt installed on it.

Automatic self reboots always worry me (remember, my first professional install was in a nuclear power plant). Plus if you’re trying to force a zigbee heal, you need the hub to stay off for at least 15 minutes.

I suppose you could put another switch upstream so you could cut power for maintenance purposes when you wanted the hub to go off and stay off for awhile. So I just wanted to mention planning for that issue as well. :sunglasses:

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Well that ain’t gonna happen. Ever.

Personally I don’t view this as an automatic reboot. To me this would be a limited programatic reboot based on conditions. ST can add all sorts of conditions that need to be met prior to reboot. I’d suggest that these conditions be kept to a minimum to allow for local variation. A self-healing capacity of the hub, if you will.

I have a Wemo switch that I’ve been meaning to put as a standalone to power cycle the hub. Thankfully I’m at my remote location this week. I’ve removed the batteries and put in the wemo.

I thought the Wemo were just as unreliable?

Is using an unreliable standalone switch to reboot an unreliable hub a best practice?

I don’t need it to be rock solid — I just need it to stay on, and turn on/off within a day.

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I think I found a use for my wink hub. Buy a switch to reboot the other system. Wink may take 5 -10 sec to perform it but at least it will work. Disappointed with the v2 hub.

The downside to an unneeded unattended reboot for the ST hub vs a reactor is quite low :smile:
I’d just like to see some attempt by the hub to realize it’s in a bad state and try to correct itself. It’s kinda silly that it doesn’t have any recovery method other than “page the monkey to pull the battery/press the reset button”.

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I run Wink and SmartThings in my house. I can connect my Wink Hub to a SmartThings Controlled receptacle and connect my SmartThings Hub to a Wink controlled receptacle. With this set up I can power cycle either hub remotely.

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I think you just divided by 0.

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All,

I emailed SmartThings about this and received the below reply yesterday. While I didn’t try it, it looks like this will allow us to reboot from anywhere. It would be great if this could be done automatically. Someone smarter than me can probably write some PC-based code to check for the hub presence initiate the reboot via Python, etc if offline for x minutes/hours.

I edited their instructions since it missed a step if you only have one hub:

Hi Alan,

Thanks for reaching out to us! Yes you can do remote reboot using the [SmartThings web manager].(https://graph.api.smartthings.com/)

Follow these steps to reboot:

  1. Log into https://graph.api.smartthings.com/
  2. Click “My Hubs”
  3. Select your Hub. (Edit: If you only have one hub, click on “View Utilities”. It’s at the very bottom and isn’t blue/underlined, but is a hyperlink)
  4. Scroll down to the “Hub commands” then click " reboot Hub
  5. Then click “My Hubs” on the navigation bar
  6. Select your Hub
  7. Scroll down click events
  8. You will see the Hub disconnect, then a few minutes later it will reconnect.

Alternately get in touch with support and we can do it for you. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Sam