My virtual Switches have stopped working. Any ideas?
(Just as I typed that I got a push notification that my hub has disconnected… uh…)
Bump… anyone have any idea what’s up with virtual switches?? They are the primary way we use Smartthings and they are not working. When we try to use them we get network errors and our hub goes offline for about half an hour. Five days of this now… I’ve reported it to Smartthings every day since the 8th. No response yet to any of my reports/requests for help.
Mr.smith
My virtual switches are all working fine, so unless someone else comments that they also have this problem it might be an issue specific to your hub / account.
Perhaps unrelated about every hour our home hub disconnects every couple of hours and then reconnects. I really hope this doesn’t happen all night (midnight here in California).
I have verified that any changes I make in the app are reflected in the IDE and our local network tests have yielded no problems. I have rebooted the hub (pulled the plug) five days in a row with no success.
I am now able to repeat the problem: All I have to do is turn a couple virtual switches on (which fails with the network error) and a minute or so later our hub will go offline. I can cause this to happen every time. So something is up I’m just not sure what it is.
mr.smith
Bump… this is still happening. Six days of this nonsense. Is anyone else having the same problem?
All of my 14 virtual switches with 5 of them being Alexa (non-momentary) virtual switches are all functioning normally with everything using them from SmartThings Automations and SmartApps to Alexa Routines.
I’ll bet the root of your problem is due to the Hub errors you are experiencing so SmartThings support would need to advise you on what’s going on with it. Good luck.
Today, all of my virtual switches stopped working. They were stuck, and while their state could be read, nothing could change them. I have automations which sync the virtual switches to my Smart Home Monitor State and could not ‘disarm’ my home.
I tried rebooting the hub, and then tried power cycling the hub. Nothing worked.
I added a new virtual switch in the IDE and then all my virtual switches started working. I don’t bother raising a support ticket as they don’t offer support for Virtual Switches. Hope this helps someone.
Failed again - I’ve replaced them with my own DTH which works: SmartThingsBrian/virtual-switch-plus.groovy at master · brianegge/SmartThingsBrian · GitHub
My virtual switches went out three days ago, and still not working. Tried your IDE-created local virtual switch trick, but it did not bring anything back. DTH is not a local entity, it is hosted on the Smartthings cloud AFAIK, or is it? I added yours and it says ‘executes in the cloud’ :-(. I prefer locals to keep me from depending on the ecosystem and with 62 virtual switches and 80 rules to edit, this is not going to be fun to ‘switch’ over :-(. Is there a trick I can use to switch over without having to edit so much? I guess I just have to edit all the switches with your new DTH and accept my fate.
We all really need to find a new workaround for the existing and ‘supported’ (?) local virtual switches. In the past rebooting the SmartThings hub would bring them back (happened twice in a year). Meanwhile my home has turned passive (automation not working) and regret is starting to settle over my home and am wondering about alternatives I have more control over. The fact we can not backup, restore or edit in a more friendly environment, the rules that is, is probably the biggest issue hanging over SmartThings, after this virtual switch outage that is. Are you really sure there is no support available for this?
When I have contacted support they have told me they don’t support virtual switches. I told them if their platform worked right I wouldn’t need virtual switches.
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Thanks for the custom DTH. Sorry about complaining about it being in the clown(sic), this means internet out almost all my automations will halt.
I agree, virtual switches are essential. My rules needed to retain some state, sometimes to track devices through several states, the virtual switches give me that. Yes, some switches are as simple as ‘away’, or ‘lock’ or ‘smoke’, but others are eg: ‘request close living room drape’ that wait for a sliding door sensor to close before the actual physical action is taken, some look after ‘living room drape is moving’ to make sure other actions are held back until completed, like not closing the sliding door (autoslide motor) on the drapes, and then the sliding door itself is thermostatically controlled to open when cooler than the AC thermostat setting requiring the drapes to open first, and the virtual switches are used to help form the extended logic tree beyond their simple ‘and’ or ‘or’, multiple 'or’s feed a switch, then those get 'and’d later.
edit: I recommend using the SmartThings Simulated Switch instead of the custom DTH
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I keep seeing reports about virtual switches ‘not working’ but haven’t seen it myself. Do they literally just not change state when told to? Presumably these are all virtual switches that have been associated with hubs to exploit local execution?
Yes, local execution.
They do not change state when told to. It spins for about 30 seconds in the app, but then resumes, but the switch did not change state. Google Home just says OK and moves on as if nothing was wrong. If you go ‘into’ the device information and change the state in that pane of the app, it responds after about 30 seconds with a network error trying to change the state as noted above.
This was my fourth ‘outage’ this past two years, but rebooting the hub solved this for the first three. This outage was intractable, no workarounds (reboot hub, reboot network modem, reboot router(s), uninstall app, reinstall app, erase app data, add and delete a new virtual switch in the app, in the IDE, in various combinations) except changing over to the Cloud based DTH above.
All Virtual Switches which used to run locally. The only good thing I can say is using the cloud DTH you don’t have to delete and re-add the switches. I tried changing the local switches via the Cloud API and didn’t get so much as a log line.
I have six virtual switches for reading and changing the home/stay/away STHM. Not doing anything to fancy with the other ones, mostly there to disable other automations from running.
My SmartThings IDE selected virtual switches stopped working with the spin off death on the same day last week when they pushed the latest Hub firmware update. But I was able to get them back by power cycling my SmartThings Hub. Other then that, the virtual switches have been totally stable, and I’m using the SmartThings virtual switches that show ‘local’ in the IDE.