The End of Groovy Has Arrived

Since about 12/17, all of my Smartthings Buttons have become unresponsive. Given the current state of the migration, I gave it a few days to see if it self-corrected, but nothing. They appear to be using the new stock driver, and probably were before they became unresponsive.

Decided to delete and add one of the buttons to see if this would fix it, but still nothing. I did notice that there appear to be many more capabilities than before and what the other buttons still show in the UI. Customer Support hasn’t been very helpful; wanting me to do the usual song and dance; reset the button, delete/ download the app (??)

Anyone else having this problem or ideas what could have caused this on or around 12/17?

I only have one ST button but has been working fine.

The old Smart Lighting app has been removed from both my locations, even though I still had automations in it.

It looks like the routines I still had in the old app got migrated a couple more times into the new one, tripling them up.

New Smart lighting app continues to work fine.

I’m still waiting for my Aeon minimotes To be migrated by st to edge

1 Like

11 posts were split to a new topic: Cannot pair/delete devices (2023)

There is a post from Samsung indicating they have paused automatic migration until after the holiday period.

1 Like

Aeon Mini Mote is working now on ST hub V3

Mine work too, they’re just not using edge drivers yet.

To all: I have like +70 devices. Even more complex is the fact that the same type of sensor for example open/close I just got what was on sale and stuff. So mix of manufacturers, Zigbee vs Zwave, etc.
However, during the Xmas week I painstakingly moved each and every one to Edge. Reset, re-pair, etc. It took me 1 full day and this time captured in a Word doc the steps. I also made sure to delete any DTH, etc. I had defined in the legacy IDE (which BTW was not simple due to references/pointers to devices).
Anyways:

  • I can safely say each and every one of them is functioning as envisaged as of today.
  • I converted each and every Smart App into a routine (where feasible, due to routine’s limitations) and they also work fine.
  • Overall the experience is substantially better since everything happens now in a snap and furthermore I did have some pesky devices who dropped connection and none have been dropping connections at all
14 Likes

@baivab
Dummy question. How do you move anything to Edge from their current protocol? What is Edge and what is Matter? I have some devices (Govee lights mainly), that have a smart app or device handler or something that I had to add in the Smartthings IDE, will those stop functioning at some point?
For anything else (zwave, zigbee stuff) what has to be done to migrate them? I assumed that happens automatically, but reading your post, I might have assumed too much from Samsung.

This has been discussed in great detail in the thread above, as well as in the two official transition FAQs. But the short answer is that almost anything you have that is using a DTH provided by Samsung will be automatically migrated to a new stock edge driver. There are a few exceptions that are now considered obsolete, and those are detailed in the official transition FAQ.

If you have devices which are using custom groovy DTHs, the system will attempt to migrate them automatically, and if it can’t, it will just add them as a “thing“ so you can manually change them to an edge driver later.

Here’s the official transition FAQ link again, so you don’t have to dig through the thread to find it. Among other things, it has the list of devices they now consider obsolete.

3 Likes

migrated to an Edge Driver you mean :slight_smile:

1 Like

Dummy question. How do you move anything to Edge from their current protocol?

If you want to manually move it, you have to go through the following steps right now

  1. identify any routines using that device. These will probably be deleted when you delete the device. If you’re OK with that, you can just rebuild the routines later. If not, you may want to add a virtual device or another device to that routine, just to prevent it from being deleted

  2. remove the device from your account

  3. if there is a custom DTH that was being used by that device, you also need to delete it, but note that you will not be able to add it back again, because they have removed the add DTH feature from the IDE. So be sure that’s what you want to do.

  4. if there is a custom edge driver that you want to use, you need to get it downloaded to your hub by subscribing to that channel. You can also subscribe to the official Beta smartthings channel to get more drivers that way.

  5. once the edge driver that you want to use is on your hub, go ahead and re-add the device to your account, if necessary using the “scan nearby“ option in the app. It should automatically find the edge driver that matches its fingerprint.

  6. now you can rebuild the routines to use the device again.

And if that sounds like a lot of work, it is. The only reason you have to do all of that now is because right now two different architectures are still operating: the old one and the new one that uses edge. So a lot of people are just waiting for the automatic migration to see how much of that works for them.

Once the transition period is over and everything is operating on the new architecture, you won’t have to go through all the steps again. When you add a new device, it will get a new edge driver.

This whole manual process is only required for people who want to get started early before the official transition process is complete.

If you need details on each of the individual steps, see the community FAQ on edge:

FAQ: I have no idea what Edge is. Is that a new developer tool? (2022)

1 Like

Oops! :face_with_peeking_eye:

Thanks for the correction, I have edited my post above.

1 Like

Edge and matter are two completely different Things which just both happen to be happening at about the same time.

  1. Matter is a new independent third-party standard, which is being adopted by much of the home automation industry, including most of the big players: Amazon, apple, Google, Samsung, Philips, Tuya, Aqara, IKEA, and many more.

  2. the purpose of matter is to make it easier for end consumers to know whether new products that they want to buy will work with their existing home automation products, in particular, the major voice assistants: Siri, Alexa, Google, and Bixby. And to make installing new products easier.

The idea is you will no longer have to try to figure out on your own whether some new inexpensive Wi-Fi device will work with what you already have. If it has a matter logo, and your platform of choice supports matter, it probably will. so that’s nice. :sunglasses:

Consumer reports has a particularly good matter FAQ:

And there’s a thread in this forum where people are discussing how Matter impacts smartthings

Matter - smart home connectivity standard (formerly Project CHIP)

  1. smartthings is going to support matter, but not all features of matter. At the time of this writing, it’s basically a one-way integration in. Once matter devices are widely available, you should be able to add pretty much anything with the matter logo to your smartthings account and see it in the smartthings app. No custom code required. But smartthings is not going to support integration outwards: you still won’t be able to add a smartthings hub and its associated devices to, for example, the IKEA app or Apple’s home app.
  1. There’s a lot more stuff to say about matter, but it will all be happening behind the scenes, so see the matter discussion thread linked to above for those details.

  2. edge is unique to Smartthings, and it’s just one part of a years long project to get rid of the free groovy hosting that smartthings used to provide. It only applies to devices that talk directly to a smartthings/Aeotec hub. It Is hoped that it will provide better speed and reliability, but we honestly don’t know for sure yet. And it does NOT get rid of the smartthings cloud: smartthings employees have posted in this forum that the system still assumes that the hub is almost always cloud connected. And the smartthings app always requires the cloud. So edge will provide more local processing, but not local-only processing.

So it’s a new smartthings – specific architecture replacing an older smartthings – specific architecture.

Here again is the link to the community FAQ on edge

FAQ: I have no idea what Edge is. Is that a new developer tool? (2022)

  1. There is a small overlap between edge and matter in that the smartthings method for implementing matter will involve edge drivers for matter devices, just like there are edge drivers for Zigbee devices and edge drivers for Z wave devices. But particularly for Matter all of this should happen behind the scenes: you just add the matter-compatible device to your account and it should automatically find the right edge driver if one is needed.
8 Likes

It seems to be perpetually being paused/extended.

Wonder how long it will be before the final axe actually falls?

2 Likes

Not to the extent that some would suggest. For example when it comes to migration of the stock handlers the very first post of this thread includes this in the timeline …

Q1 of 2023

· Complete 1st Party DTH migrations

· Shutdown Graph IDE

That was edited on 21st September but is consistent with ‘a few months’ in the original version.

There has been some lazy writing by ST in places, but also some lazy reading.

8 Likes

…and in addition it was a wise move, IMO, for the ST team to move the final steps out past the holiday season.

4 Likes

I’ve been following this thread and have been patiently waiting for my devices to be moved over to the new edge drivers, but as of today, I still have many devices that appear to not have migrated.

From the groovy IDE, all my z-wave Leviton in-wall outlets, Smartthings (original) motion and multi sensors, Schlage z-wave locks, Belkin wemo switches, and Xiaomi ambient light sensors still don’t show “placeholder”.

Should I be worried that they will just fail to work once groovy is shut down?

Everything will be fine. Do not panic!

3 Likes