cladmonitor
commented
4 years ago - Lets be honest with ourselves about the Homebridge ecosystem, its a community driven project and with that we all need to understand that A) people are donating their freetime to maintain these and B) Unexpected changes could occur at any time. If tonesto was hit by a bus (god forbid) things would probably suffer for a time until somone else picked things up and carried on or it would at some point be obsolete. Speaking as a long time user of homebridge, I've never been burnt by a plugin becoming abandoned, the ones that have had no changes still operate to this day. Second, this is all a hack and we are all hoping it continues to work, the more likely case is Apple screws us all by making a fundamental change to the OS which is the most likely outcome.
- Send commands locally means the commands are coming from the HB instance and not being sent from the Smart Things cloud, this is a faster solution for near real time changes. You can see the time delay by unchecking the option and operating a device (contact sensors or buttons), I see a wait of up to 30 seconds if its disabled. (really screws you with buttons and switches)
Troubleshooting HB, I highly suggest using config-ui-x and learning how to uninstall and modify your config to exclude plugins from operating to try and setup the least amount of items to see if you can fault a specific item to blame for this problem, also in insecure mode you can manipulate the accessories from a webui so if you see "unresponsive" itemson your iDevice you can look at the web and see if the item responds correctly (or if you cant reach your HB specifically, i.e a network issue) Secondly, make certain you have an iPad or AppleTV(Preferable and wired if you can) connected to your network. Many times I've helped others troubleshoot this cause its becuase of wifi issues and devices transitioning to LTE/Cellular and not being able to communicate back to their home network. Good Luck!
tonesto7
scoobaspeaz
JJJ
Areson
This plugin is pretty awesome and I am glad you made it! I do have a couple questions though hopefully you can answer.
If you abandon this project what happens to our ability to control devices managed through this plugin? It seems all functionality depends on your app to control our devices through homebridge. Im just wondering before I get too invested in products that use SmartThings that rely on this plugins ability to exist and function :)
What exactly does "Send HomeKit Commands locally" do? Meaning, short of just saying X sends the command locally what does this mean vs disabling it? Where does the commands come from and what commands does this reference?
What prompted me to post these questions is because im trying to troubleshoot why randomly homebridge disconnects from HomeKit. I noticed at times it shows my devices unavailable in the Home app. If I check the ID of homebridge, or any of the devices attached through homebridge, then it shows ID failed. If I wait a few mins it will come back and say succeeded and then my devices are working as expected in the Home app. I dont see any errors or anything of the sort in any of the logs indicating what is causing the issue even with debug on. I dont even know if its SmartThings v2 plugin doing it or not.