I am having a horrible time trying to get the Harmony activities to Smartthings to Echo to work. I have now spent two days, and as a new user to all of this, the instructions are frustrating. I have read as many comments as I can, but I can see there’s a lot of differences from last year’s helpful tips to this year.
I apologize for the long post, but I am so frustrated at my own inability to get this system to work! I’m not a tech expert by any means, but I have read so much that I feel like I should be able to do a better job.
In a nutshell, none of my Smartthings activities/devices/switches will work. Everything worked fine in Harmony. I can push the “on” button to turn on the TV and nothing happens. I’ve gone thru the triggers, made virtual buttons, etc…and I must be missing some basic steps.
I did the sharing between ST and Echo, and if I ask her to “turn on the TV”, I get the response "I found several devices that match that, which one do you want? UGH!
Thanks for any help someone can give me. Again, I apologize for the excessive info, but I wasn’t sure how else to demonstrate how far I have gotten!
I don’t see an activity called “TV” for example. In your case, you’d have to say “Alexa, turn on Please turn on the TV” for it to work.
I have 3 Harmony hubs and the activities have to be unique names. What I settled on is that the devices in my entertainment center have the device name with no qualifier - for example, TV, Roku, Netflix, Plex, Blu Ray, etc. So for those devices, I’ll say “Alexa, turn on the TV” and the entertainment center TV turns on. For my Office hub, I preface the device names with “Office” so it is now “Alexa, turn on the Office TV.”
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
1942
Thought I would revive this thread with an update.
Sometime around the middle of May, maybe sooner, but I’m guessing about 7 to 8 weeks ago I started making changes to my system. The one most significant change was that I began to use the stock ST routines tab.
At first I set them up as full on routines: ie, change the mode and do a bunch of stuff.
I quickly found that to be unreliable.
So I then set the routines up to ONLY change the mode. I transitioned to CoRE from rule machine for my routines, this was due to the lack of support from the RM developer.
What I found was that the ST routines are incredibly reliable for mode changes, as long as that was all that they did.
Well, I am sad to say that tonight was the first time that my system has failed to change a mode in approximately 7 weeks.
7 mode changes per day x 7 days per week x 7 weeks = 343 mode changes.
That an overwhelming 99.9971% success rate in that category.
Almost 5 - 9’s.
I have no idea why the made failed to change and it sucks that it did because for about 7 weeks my system has been phenomenal.
I will say this… Less than a year ago having your modes change automatically more than once a day was rare. There have been dramatic improvements… But @alex@slagle@jody.albritton, the company isn’t done yet. Please, do not let the hard work and the many steps forward fall flat on its face.
As we’ve discussed in the past, consumer products are not generally rated in reliability per number of transactions. Rather they are rated in reliability per operating days. (MFOP, or Maintenance Free Operating Period)
In this case, you had 49 days, and then one failure. That’s a 98% success rate. considerably below what is expected of most consumer products.
Seven weeks without a failure is obviously better than six weeks without a failure, but it’s not anywhere near dishwasher level reliability, let alone security system level reliability.
No one expects five nines reliability for most consumer products. But they don’t expect the product to go less than two months without an impactful failure, either.
I absolutely believe that the company has committed to improving reliability, and I’m sure they are using typical industry standards for measuring that. I am hopeful that we will see eventual improvements. But if home automation at this price point is to take off, it’s going to have to run a lot longer than two months without an impactful failure, regardless of the number of events it processes per day.
I am sad to report that some of the old problems look like they are creeping back. Over the past several days I have been experiencing failed timed events. This is being caused by long delays executing tasks. The only difference I see this time around is looking a the IDE I don’t see scheduled events in the past, I just see blanks for the next scheduled event.
Yoo hoo! The ‘chicken dance’ is back. Lights via Smart Lighting have started to turn off while motion is still active. I give ST credit for improving reliabilty in recent months, but like @JDRoberts said…seven weeks with no incidents is better than six, but not nearly enough for people to rely on ST. My issues this week are a replica of May 22 problems. Is like they reversed all of the sudden everything they have been working on…
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
1946
I couldn’t agree more, 7 weeks is better than six. But like I said, the work is nowhere near done and I hope there isn’t a backwards slide occurring, again.
Lots of improvements… Lots better than it was…
Which is going to make these failures even more predominant.
There have been two really bad side-effects of the SmartThings reliability issues for me.
.1. I no longer trust the tools. Recently when a routine was firing inconsistently, I blamed ST for the inconsistency rather than checking every aspect of the routine. Which was, in this case, the wrong choice. The routine had been changed at some point - a conditional that it defaults with but I’d removed a long time ago had somehow popped back up - and that was what made it unreliable to the casual observer. Not actual unreliability.
Of course there’s still the issue of how it partially restored to the default/original state, but I’ve learned not to look too closely into the mouth of a rabid lion with periodontal disease and vicious halitosis, which does pretty much characterize SmartThings.
.2. I lost the passion. I wrote LANNouncer. Did some pretty cool stuff. I’ve enhanced it and have more cool stuff, but I’m having trouble caring about wrapping it up with a nice bow. I was ready to about a month ago, but ST went nuts again and my energy with it.
If the SmartThings crew wants an enthusiastic following, they have to stop hurting us.
Not to add fuel to the fire but, since owning ST (about 4 months now) I ran into my first reliability issue. Some smartapps and things will respond sometimes, and sometimes will not. Started today and I am seeing it intermittently so far.
