They have historically had a reputation for having nonresponsive customer service, at least when the questions were asked in English. It got better for a while and then worse again, perhaps because a specific person changed roles.
The engineering on these has always been good. But you’ll see in other forum postings from last year that I have always recommended that people buy them using a credit card so that they can have the credit card company not pay if there’s a defective unit, just because it can be so difficult to get them to respond to a return request.
I’ve placed three orders from WST this year so far and I’m absolutely loving them. I’m slowly finding myself switching out ST Zigbee devices and Z-wave sensors to WST tags and sensors because of their superior reliability, sensitivity, and range. Their performance is solid and the logic built into the sensors and app/web client just smokes anything else out of the box.
Customer support is virtually non-existent because the whole operation is a one-man show that he operates out of his house part-time. He will respond to the occasional support request on the forum and you can find a lot of answers on there. There’s a bias towards geeky questions getting responses as opposed to newbie-level questions. Platform-wide disruptions are addressed relatively quickly. From what I’ve seen on the forums, he will replace defective tags that are mailed back to him and, if you opt to do so, you can send all your tags to him for a firmware update roundtrip.
Overall, highly recommended for the applications you’re considering.
I like my sensor tags, but I do occasionally have a significant delay. I mostly use my tags as presence sensors for vehicles. They don’t always reflect the correct status. I’ve also had issues with the getting the water sensor to do what I want in complete opposite cases.
In my experience, they have great range. I was able to drive down the road and around the corner about a quarter mile while still being able to control the device (light blink).
The one I have in my safe to detect the door opening and closing is always spot on. As soon as the door opens or closes I get a message on my phone.
well - after I logged out and back in it seems to have worked. The odd thing is that I now have 6 new things, but I only have two sensors. They are showing as motion sensors in the title but they have a temp in the icon. Very odd.
Live log shows this: physicalgraph.scheduling.CronExpressionException: Invalid cron expression found ‘0 0/60 * * * ?’
I tried to set the refresh interval to 60 mins… perhaps this was my mistake?
If I make the min update frequency be 59 it works…
I am ready to buy a whole bunch of these sensors. I need to control several windows/doors and it seems to be a good balance between price/functionality from what I have read in the forums. I am thinking about buying the manager + 10 sensors. Before pulling the trigger, do you guys know of any discount code I can use? Thanks.
Got this working with one of the Kumo PIRs today. Thanks for writing the integration.
WST does seem to be sending the motion_timedout call now. So you can uncomment line 68 in the app, unless there is something else wrong that I’m not aware of.
case "motion_timedout": data = [acceleration: "inactive", motion: "inactive"]; break
But they seem to expire motion very, very slowly. Perhaps my cat is keeping it alive. I’m not sure. But I’ve seen a 4 minute delay when I have WST set at 1 minute. I’d really like to keep the expiration on WST so it will stay alive properly when there is continuous motion in the room.
I’m going to do some more testing tonight.
Either way, these tags seem nice and the hub is tiny.
The issue I’d be like to solve is that these tags are almost too full-featured in that they could be used as a presence sensor, a motion sensor, a temperature sensor and a door open/closed sensor. But in ST, they only appear as a single device and that single device doesn’t fit neatly into a single category. For example, there are a couple I’m using as motion sensors, mostly, and another 2 as temp sensors, but the ST interface shows the temperature as the primary thing. I notice the WST integration with Alexa seems to create multiple “devices” per tag, which seems like maybe a good way to handle it in that then the same device could be in multiple categories. It would be nice (though perhaps potentially confusing) to have the same option in ST. Anyone else thought about this?
Sorry to dig up an old post, but I ran across it when looking for a solution to monitor my climate controlled humidors. For using this setup with ST integration, are you still happy with it? I was going to buy two or three Zooz multi sensors, but doing the WST could be more cost effective in the long run and rank much higher on the “geek out” factor. Any feedback would be appreciated.
My 2c. The integration works fairly well, but I’d avoid WST. I have tags fail randomly/go offline/out of range without being moved. It’s not frequent, but not ideal, and a pain to fix. Beyond that, I find the way that the support person/owner/whatever (Cao) treats customers to be incredibly rude. He’ll dismiss/ignore your complaints and even ban you from the forum if you ask a question he doesn’t like.
I’d read up here: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/wireless-sensor-tags the folks that have had good luck/no problems love and recommend them (I was one until I started running into the issues) but read various posts and see how they are responded tol.
I read through the google forum and it’s definitely colorful!
Unfortunately these tags are the only “smart device” that can give me the precision I need for a humidor. Most of the other devices I’ve looked at had a +/- 5% variable for the humidity. I did find one other sensor, but it was Bluetooth only.
If it’s Bluetooth and you have an android phone/tablet, you might be able to set up a SmartThings integration with Tasker and Sharptools. But it would be best to take that discussion back to your original thread.
So I rolled the dice with buying a tag reader and two pro tags. I guess I have to give credit where credit is due. I placed my order last night at 7:30PM CST and it shipped first thing this morning. I’ve already got a tracking number. Now lets hope I don’t need any help from support. Cheers!
If you do go with them, I’d say just make sure you have a backup plan just in case they start failing to notify etc. Maybe one of the +/- 5% variance devices, as a failsafe. Being off by 5% is better than nothing!
I still use WST and it works most of the time, I just don’t trust it to always work (for instance, i had it monitoring moisture in plants. Well, it decided to just stop monitoring and I had a very dry plant before I had manually checked.) Basically I treat them as a secondary reminder at this point. If something is important it’s always good to have two independent readings anyway.
One other thing, you might be able to use the Fibaro RGBW (which has analogue inputs for temp/etc) or the Fibaro Door/window sensor which I know can monitor temp if you add a DS18b20, so one would think it could do humidity as well.) Just a couplel other options to look into. I believe the 18b20 is close to +/- 1% and those can be calibrated.
Funny enough my plan is to use them as a backup. I’ve got a fairly high end hygrometer in my humidor already, but of course it’s not a connected one. I’m wanting something that I have alert me if there’s a big chance. That way I’m prompted to check my analog one. Thanks again for the replies and I’ll post an update when I have one.
@swanny Thanks for the awesome integration! I just got my tag reader and tags and everything is working great! One question I had was around what shows up as the default type. What I mean by this is when I look at “things” in my SmartThings app is shows the tag and the tag temperature. Is there anyway to have it display open close instead? Or motion active? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Cheers!
Since swanny has abandoned the code, I’ve spent some time trying to iron out a few kinks.
WST has fixed the motion inactive callback. The background process that sets it to inactive is no longer necessary. (I’ve set it to 30 minutes as a backup. But this isn’t even necessary.)
The ST app code has at least two bugs. (1) The device update forces a rearm and a door close reset Hence, it will destroy your door closed settings and often cause the smart app to fail to initialize as it takes so long. (2) The polling will always set the tags to motion inactive.
I’ve fixed both of these bugs and made the integration trust the motion inactive callback. I posted a fork to my gitHub. [I have a bit of cleanup to do still, as I’m currently ignoring the timeout interval setting.]
Cheers!