Can happen for several reasons. Can happen in Vera as well. There is a Youtube video where some guy in India logged into Micasaverde, accessed an account and unlocked a door halfway around the world. There is another video where a guy had some kind of sniffer for Z-wave, picked the door lock signal, decoded and took control of the door. There is also a guy who hacked into a Casino through the aquarium controller.
That risk is there no matter what platform you use. Just a question of how much security are you willing to gamble for the sake of convenience.
nevertheless we are able to program non-native routines and reprogram devices to work with ST, not sure but this is probably not something we can do with Apple Home.
I’ve had ST for less than a month. I haven’t really had any issues with it except I was kinda disappointed with the whole layout of things. It just doesn’t seem like a good design and seems limited with automation rules but I do get I’m not really the target market for the box given my IT/programming background. I played around with Home Assistant installed in a container on my unRaid box and wow…just wow. I have it bridged to SmartThings right now but I’ll probably end up just buying a Zwave USB stick and selling my ST.
I had a similar experience. I have button controllers that control non-local trendsetter devices and run routines. I was able to use my buttons throughout the outage.
It’s possible that the entire outage had overlapping or different intermittent issues throughout that at some point, maybe in the beginning, only the front end (App and IDE accessibility) were impacted which still allowed for cloud functionality (Routines and Pistons) to occur and work, but at some point this was a full blown outage where the cloud was impacted and at that point only local processing would work. It’s great that you had some functionality at some point during the outage.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
101
Yup … That definitely sounds feasible; i.e., routines (including button controller triggers) within the SmartThings Cloud continued to function.
Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, ActionTiles, etc., did not work, because they are cloud-to-cloud; or external API calls into the SmartThings cloud.
I wish SmartThings would just come out and give us a detailed report of the exact scope of the outage. I’d love also to know the root cause, but that’s too much to expect.
JD Curious what do you define as maintenance or more specifically what is the most common issue that has plagued you?
For me most of my maintenance has been replacing batteries or self induced. There are so many things to play around with and try I am constantly tweaking things. For me personally a lot of the issues I have had were due to my ZigBee mesh not being strong enough and putting off buying repeaters because things worked fine for so long. Something must have changed locally that started causing ZigBee interference issues. Most recently many of my devices were very slow to respond or would not respond at all. Routines and Scenes would only partially complete. I spent 2 weeks wracking my brain at first I thought ST was taking a . But I was also experiencing them dropping offline altogether occasionally. That led me to start investigating my network as the issue. Turns out I was impacted by the Google Cast MDNS flood issue that causes the routers memory to become full and start causing flaky network problems. It was tough to tell on my pc’s this was happening since they are hard wired. Over the holidays I went from one Chromecast video and one Chromecast audio to 2 Video and 5 audios because they were so cheap. This increase in devices caused the problem to slowly creep up as an issue as I added each one to the network.
The other thing I battled not related to ST was LiFX bulbs becoming non responsive or just failing all together. Not sure if I got a bad batch but I had to replace 4 out of 9 bulbs. Since those have been replaced things seem to have stabilized. On one hand I would not expect four very expensive bulbs to die, but on the plus side LiFX support has been great to deal with. They don’t make you jump through hoops, bulb not working they send you a new one. So for me that helped ease the frustration and justify the price of the bulbs. I spent some $$$ on a Neato and it has not worked properly since day one, support made me jump through hoops then went non responsive and I finally had to call after several e-mails and then they wanted me to go through the same hoops as I went through on the first call and then after saying they would send me an RMA form a week went by and I had to follow up with them to finally get them to e-mail the RMA.
As far as how I define maintenance, maintenance is anything I have to do with the system after I have it set up and working the way I want.
Scheduled maintenance that I can do on my schedule is a different matter, I assume there will be some of that, but not more than once a week.
As I mentioned, I’ve had no difficulty finding systems that meet my “minimum 6 months MFOP” requirements, including Lutron Caseta, the hue bridge, Logitech Harmony, HomeKit, Alexa… but those are all much simpler than SmartThings. On the other hand, my security system is probably at least as complicated as SmartThings and still don’t require any of my time, But then I’m paying monthly maintenance contracts for those.
So I don’t think it’s a complicated definition. If something that was working on Monday stops working on Tuesday, some kind of maintenance is required.
I would say the most common problem that I’ve encountered is just events not happening when they were supposed to. Stuff that worked on Monday and stopped working on Tuesday. There could be any one of a number of reasons, it’s just not a very robust system as it now exists.
Thanks for explaining. I Have the same gear with the exception of the Logitech Harmony. But I have had to spend some time troubleshooting home kit and hue. Hue problem was related to ZigBee interference, once again a case of something working fine for months and then lights started going unresponsive. Thankfully the Hue engineers had the foresight to realize that users environments change and what may work one day might not the next and allow you to change the channel:face_with_hand_over_mouth:
Homekit has been ok I had problems where it would change my device groups and names. I kind of gave up on it for a while because I was tired of constantly changing them back.
Obviously each persons automations, devices, and experience will be different, I had not seen the bug reports and many of them I have not noticed but I also don’t depend on it, so I don’t think about it is much when something doesn’t fire properly. I also don’t do a lot events other than lighting since our house has a crazy schedule. I mostly use google home or alexa to manually trigger routines or scenes. I assume that is another reason I may not notice as often as others when events don’t trigger on schedule etc. I also have not been using it as long as yourself.
Using RBoy’s SmartApp enables that same functionality but with the ability to code all doors. During the ST outage my doors worked liked normal with the user codes I entered from the SmartApp.
Are you saying that if the cloud is down at a time when a code is supposed to be re-enabled at the lock, rboy’s app can somehow manage to deliver and enable the code… despite the ST cloud being totally inaccessible?
How does that work? Is rboy maintaining his own cloud service or something?
I use @RBoy DTH and App as well. I think what you’re trying to say is that the door locks will continue to allow direct physical access via the keypad during an ST outage because the lock’s access codes are already stored in the lock by then - via @RBoy’s DTH/App . This offline capability does not extend to remote control or ST access to the lock during the ST outage…
. But I was also experiencing them dropping offline altogether occasionally. That led me to start investigating my network as the issue. Turns out I was impacted by the Google Cast MDNS flood issue that causes the routers memory to become full and start causing flaky network problems. It was tough to tell on my pc’s this was happening since they are hard wired. Over the holidays I went from one Chromecast video and one Chromecast audio to 2 Video and 5 audios because they were so cheap. This increase in devices caused the problem to slowly creep up as an issue as I added each one to the network.