General Feedback, Feature Requests and Slowdowns

I would love to see an app that could take care of behind the scenes color temperature and level staging per mode, or time of day, like a circadian lighting type of thing, but able to be overridden. This would really simplify my lighting rules.

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I know.. Y’all are so secretive :crazy_face:

A good surprise is better than 1000 unfulfilled promises.

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True..

Could you do maybe a special a live episode at around maybe 6:00 PM EST at some point? That would be then 11:00 PM over here, which would be easier to stay up for :wink:. Hopefully then that still wouldn't be too early for everyone in america :smile:

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I would like to see improvements in the RM UI. Rule Machine does everything I want, but editing a current rule is a pain. Better editing of conditionals and re-ordering of steps would be at the top of this list.

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Harmony Integration...

@gavincampbell I would love to see a feature that graphically mapped the routing table so I knew what was being routed through what device. I have some wall warts I would love to move but am afraid to do so as I don't know how it will affect the mesh. Would also be useful in diagnosing problematic devices.

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I believe Logitech stopped accepting new partners for official integration with harmony a while back. There are community-developed workarounds if you’re interested (PM me and I can point you towards them). But it’s not an integration hubitat could officially support even if they wanted to.

Yea.. Groovy access is the real power behind this platform... We have probably all started from the smartthings documentation.. But having not programmed in groovy before it was a bit of a rough start, at least for me... Probably less of a rough start for people with more java experience.. I have not done much in java but had lots of experience in several other languages...

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FWIW, most of that is in the documentation for the Groups and Scenes app. (I think the "Use group device to indiciate..." options are newer, but they are simple and just do what they say: creating a group using the Group and Scenes app makes a group device, and you can choose if you want that device to be on of one or more member devices are on or--and this is mutually exclusive, so the other option will disappear when you choose either--off if one or more member devices are off.)

Rule Machine does not have options like these, but the whole Rule Machine app is somewhat "advanced" to begin with. :slight_smile: They've demoed some things in RM on at least one Hubitat Live episode before and have a few videos up on their YouTube channel that may interest you. Otherwise, the Rule 4.0 docs are good place to start there, too.

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The problem is, there are basics for troubleshooting, but they are only a start. It's impossible to simply find what's causing the problem without a lot of lengthy investigation and sometimes just AB testing. There's just so many variables.

Persistence and patience are key, but not all users employ those methods and prefer to voice dissatisfaction - This comment not directed at you in any way. I'm just noting an observation of what I notice as a being a fairly common occurrence. So on that subject, basic troubleshooting methods might be helpful for many.

Every time I have found any slowness in my hub, I have found things that have been my doing that resulted in the issue. Or it has been a device that was unresponsive and I didn't know it. Once that had been resolved or removed, the problems go away. As a recent example, I'm waiting to test again tonight, but I may have improved my hub responsiveness at the 2am mark. I found my Sonos Integration with my Symfonisk speakers may have been the cause. My fault. Returned one of them and swapped their names. I forgot to fix it in HE and so it was looking for two speakers that it showed as existing, but in fact they were both not found.

Possibly a discussion around optionally distributing the hub load, may also be a healthy conversation to have. I know some have this belief that you shouldn't need multiple hubs or bridges, but I gotta say it works great for me. I only use a single Hubitat hub, but it primarily functions as the brains of the operation. Rules are for the most part triggered by virtual switches and activate virtual switches, or via integration apps and drivers. The majority of my lights, buttons, motion sensors, contact sensors, and even my alarm system are on other hubs integrated with HE. My setup is very solid using this method, and I know others have a similar experience. In other words, my HE hub pretty well communicates with my devices via IP to other hubs and bridges.

What do you mean by this though? Address that some people have them? That's been done. Many do not have them. Where could a conversation like that go?

They could address that they are investigating, but have no conclusive results from their investigation, but that's been done here on the forum already. Does it really help to say they're looking into things and have no conclusive results of their testing on YouTube as well?

There's nothing conclusive that I've seen reported that anyone can point at as a cause. Very often it's been a malfunctioning device, a custom app, a malformed rule, an orphaned device, network issues, etc. Significant problems with the hub platform relating to slowdowns that have been positively identified and fixed have been more rare of an occurrence.

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Drag and drop would be a game changer. It would also be great if the devices listed for a dashboard became checked or bolded once they were added to the dashboard. That way when you are replacing or adding devices you can see that you have the device on a tile in the dashboard. I’m specifically thinking of my battery dashboard and the fact that it would be easier to delete it and start over than to try to figure out if all of the devices are represented.

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We need tools that help identify causes for slowdowns. Better debugging, proactive alerting that helps figuring out the root cause.

Can you be more specific for them? There are debug switches in apps. There are logs. There are indicators in Rules when they are malformed and broken. There is a way to view device reporting status and basic routing reports for Zigbee. System events are reported.

What tools are you thinking will help further? Keeping in mind that this is getting off topic, since the request was for topic discussion in future Hubitat live episodes, not feature enhancement requests :wink:

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I would like to hear about plans for Camera support, like Arlo and Ring.

Official ring support would be nice.. But I wouldn’t hold my breath... It seems the issue here is ring’s lack of wanting to integrate with any more platforms (probably due to their amazon acquisition), and lack of releasing a documented public api...

But @codahq has an integration that does just about everything I need...

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Thank you for your feedback. While we are working on many things, we generally don't speak of future plans, although we are known to show quick previews from time to time :wink:

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I would like to see some Hub Management tools.

It's obvious to me that some of the Hub slowdowns have been caused by just trying to do too much with one Hub. Obviously, there is some sort of a limit (CPU, Memory, I/O Bandwidth, etc.). Obviously the more integrations that I put on that Hub, the more chance there is of slowdown. By integrations, I mean: Google Home, Alexa Speaks, Sharptools, Harmony, Ring, Broadlink, etc....
How many is too many?
How do we measure the load?
How do we know how far we can go?

Hub Management Tools are the answer. However, I'm just not knowledgeable enough to know which tools, when are they to be run, how to interpret, etc.

Perhaps they could be part of the 3am Backup window....

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