Weekly Update from Alex - 05/19/16

Hiccups happen to the better of the services. Is a matter of how long and what’s the damage. If service restored and everything is working…well it’s the life of living in the cloud, I guess. Is your log looking like this?

You were right. I checked in our internal thread and found that we had a partial device_conn outage from 9:13 — 9:43 am PT where 8 of our 12 device_conn nodes lost their queues, leading to partial impacts to some users. It’s resolved now and I also drilled into why the status page wasn’t updated in real time. It turns out that it was because the team that page wasn’t informed in this case until after the partial outage was already resolved. We’ll learn from that and improve.

The status page has been updated now. I want that to be an absolutely trustworthy information source for everyone.

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Thanks Alex!

I am right off the bat guessing the answer is no (and I don’t blame you either) but any chance that includes Windows? It’d be great if at the very least, the WP app was updated to the new interface like iOS and Android, and even better if it was made into a Universal app I could run on my PC…

…but I also realize that focusing on the basics probably means that with the current market share that Windows wouldn’t be a priority.

While this may be true I think many would see the value in a native pc app

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Things have been working extremely well for me. I’ve even added additional devices and wrote my first smart app to give me conditions for motion sending without having to use Rule Machine anymore. I’ve learned not to “put all of my eggs in one basket” after having to redo everything I put into RM.

In regard to presence. I use both life 360 and ST in tandem. Gives me a backup of sorts. In reality, I’ve not had a problem with either in a very long time on my Samsung S5 and my wife’s Iphone 4s. They only time there is an issue is when she is talking on they phone when she leaves or comes home. It’s 3g so no simultaneous data and voice. This is not a ST issue but a phone/network issue.

Overall, I am very pleased with the stability add of late. I’m almost ready to add my siren back into SHM.

Still issuing a v1 hub.

Steve

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What phone do you have? I’ve found presence has been almost completely reliable on my Samsung since I excluded the SmartThings app from battery saving. This is a Samsung specific thing that kills off apps that haven’t been used for a while, and it affects things that need to run in the background.

Excluding ST from that hasn’t really impacted battery life but has made presence reliable.

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iPhones 5 through 6…

Wife and I have iPhone 6s’s and they have been flawless with presence. Also when I had a 5s and she had a 4s we still had no issues with presence detection.

Consider yourself lucky. Many people on both iOS and Android have issues.

Since there are already literally about 17 different threads in the forums discussing geopresence and various methods and devices, could you take the GPS conversations to one of those? We’re getting pretty far off topic here. Thanks. :sunglasses:

Since way back when this started we were discussing the company’s renewed commitment to “the basics,” I think we can all agree that it would be good from the basic standpoint if a functionality that is featured in the SmartThings marketing, like Geopresence, worked reliably with the officially supported devices/methods for at least 90% of the customers who tried it. (“Reliably” in this case means 99 days out of 100 with no failures.)

Discussions of why an individual customer might not experience that level of reliability at present, or what to do about it, or any historical experiences, good or bad, would belong in a different thread.

The following is a good active thread on presence issues, but there are several others as well:

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The Hackathon sure looks like fun!

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Since the update it I have had trouble two days in a row now where SmartAlarm isn’t getting the status changes from my I’m Back routine to unarm. This is annoying and is forcing me take out the siren again.

Before this I had been OK sorta with the system. Random status mismatches keep coming sporadically. I can fix it if I open/close the door or turn on/off a light to force a status resync.

I think you can improve performance further by improving caching on the app themselves. I find it baffling how your devs think it’s efficient to load the full bitmaps for every thing and room every single time I use the app or even changing screens. Surely you can lessen the load on your back end by using some better caching algorithms and ttl on the app itself. Would also massively improve performance for end users if you did so.

@alex I am very disappointed to report that my wife has started doing the ‘chiken dance’ in the middle of the kitchen because the lights turned off while she was cooking. This has not happened since late October, I believe. It appears that changes were made to how Smart Lighting handles the lights on motion with delays. I have my kitchen lights set to turn off after 3 minutes. Today they turned off and wouldn’t come back on because the motion was still active. She had to stay still so that motion stops, before lights came back on. After such a good run without major annoyances, this was very disappointing to observe. @slagle could you please check on this issues, when you get a chance?

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I’ve had this issue a few times the last two days, figured it was just me. Maybe not. Exact same scenario.

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I have to ask the obvious question, @alex:

Since Smart Lighting is just a SmartApp like the ones anyone in the Developer Community can write, why not make it open source? This way the tremendous well of volunteer resources here can contribute to:

(a) Finding the cause of this issue … it may be particularly easy if the version control (git) change history is also published; and

(b) Helping to avoid the introduction of this type of issue to platform wide release by participating in code reviews and Beta testing for a short period prior to each update.


Certainly some portion of SmartThings’s platform and even SmartApp and Device Type Handler code will always be “proprietary”. As co-founder of SmartTiles, I know there are good justifications for proprietary code.

I think that the code for Smart Lighting, however, and perhaps even Smart Home Monitor, do not represent “trade secrets” that would undercut SmartThings’s commercial success if openly shared.

Regardless, even if the code must be kept closed, option “(b) pre-release in-the-wild beta testing”, can still help significantly … even if only for a day or two for minor updates!

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I’ve been seeing this exact same problem over the past couple of days.

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We are also having the motion sensor problem. This is a definite change.

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I did have something occur today that was completely new to me (though others have experienced it). I came home at 6:45 tonight to find every light in the house on… both switches and bulbs.

I have no idea what caused it… since I could not get my events log to refresh and go back past the first 25 events (real pain in the butt there ST).

It could have been a crazy glitch from the system

OR

It could have been cause by my minimote. I have a button programmed to set the living room lights to a random color. Before the event logs stopped cooperating with me I saw that he had pressed that button (my best guess here) at least 150 to 200 times over the past hour.

So, random glitch by ST or system went crazy because of my crazy 12 y/o that likes the pretty lights.