For Context: For others using Twilio, make sure to look into your account and your number(s) to make sure you do that registration process, or it's likely, like me, notifications will just stop. The 10DLC process is designed to stop spam and fraud, and that mechanism does have a cost associated with it (which I'm not happy about it, but the costs are low for the time being). This is a US-wide change in the systems for sending messages to individuals, so Twilio is not the only service affected. The process for registering a number under the 10DLC program takes a few weeks, so I might not get text messages for a while.
Backstory: So my smoke detector went off in the middle of the night (a known issue with the First Alert combo CO/Smoke units past a certain age), and I didn't get my text message from the Safety Monitor. Turns out, it was blocked for "US A2P 10DLC - Message from an Unregistered Number." (see attachment, and also this article Error 30034 | Twilio) Funny thing is, my wife got the text messages, and we're with the same carrier!
I've changed some things to make it more obvious why the alarms are going off because at 4AM, the confusion, anger, and frustration overrode rational thought. Trying to turn off the sirens not knowing what was causing it just didn't work (Hubitat was following the rules I gave it and keep setting them back off, but because I didn't get the notification I didn't know why). Ultimately I just had to pull the detector down. The weird thing was the detector ITSELF wasn't going off initially, hence the confusion. It did finally sound after the 3rd or 4th "Smoke Detected" message was sent to the hub, but after all my other alarms were already going off. At least I know the hub will wake me up during an actual emergency!
I've had First Alert photoelectric detectors, and I feel that spiders get into the sensor and set them off. I recently had to replace the CO detectors I piggybacked onto the hardwired system, and replaced the PE and CO detectors with First Alert Ionization/CO combinations units, to try to limit the false alarms.
I also recently put a First Alert ZCombo detector in the garage. The house didn't come with an alarm in the garage, and I feel something is better than nothing. No false alarms from CO yet, but I don't think they're super sensitive to short duration events. However, its Photoelectric, I store wood for the winter in the garage, and....spiders.
I hadn't heard the ZCombos giving false alarms after a certain age was a known thing. Maybe it's the spiders.
On the Twilio side, I haven't been able to use the nice SendMail app by @kahn-hubitat because of changes by my Internet provider. I've gone to Pushover, which is great, but you have to keep mobile data turned on. I'd like to find a non-Google, etc, replacement, but it's not looking good.
I'd be curious as to when you get approved. We use Twilio at work; and we submitted two weeks ago. Our release cycle is pending until we can confirm Twilio is not blocking our numbers.
We submitted a support ticket; and they basically said they are using a 3rd party for the verification process... and are at their mercy with turnarounds.
@DustyFromBMore Ok so since the local system uses internet to send messages to twilo then twillo sends that to your phone via SMS, wouldn't it simply be easier to have the hub send messages directly to your phone via built in notifier or pushover? Just curious.
rlithgow1 To MY phone yes, when it works, but I can't put the app on the phones of everyone I want to have contacted regarding a fire or a break-in, especially if I'm out of state and can't do anything about it. I can have the hub send notifications via text which (assuming I can get it working again) can just go out to whomever I like regardless of familial affiliation and without having to give them logins to my hub for the push notifications. Someone in this thread mentioned a few alternatives, so if Twilio doesn't work out long term I might have to look into those.
I'll try to remember to update the post when everything goes through, and do some tests from my hub. Right now, to my cell number at least, nothing is getting through (I do get most of the in-app notifications).
Yes, ours are sporadic. We test/develop every day, 7 days a week, and Twilio is a major backbone to our app at work. Usually, the first SMS will go through, and each subsequent request fails (on group notifications). Yes, please keep the thread updated. I'll do the same. Thanks!
Just following up that we received our Twilio approval yesterday. We had decided to also run our app through the AWS service (for redundancy).. and we were also pending approval through AWS. They were both approved yesterday; and our notifications are working again. It took just under three weeks to complete.
@rlithgow1 FYI push notifications still require internet to send and receive. Apple and Google have push notification server technology that applications have to integrate to in order to deliver the notifications. HE and Pushover notifications are not local.
Apparently my campaign was REJECTED, so I'm not in compliance. I need to submit a new campaign. Not sure what to do now. [EDIT: Ticket opened with Twilio... let's see what they say]
Really?!! That's no bueno. I don't know if there are any differences between personal and business tiers; but we had to submit both articles of incorporation and our employer identification number. Did you use the "sole proprietor" customer type during registration?
Just curious how you use notifications in a useful way.....I have an iPhone. I hate the way that notifications are managed on apple devices. If I am using my phone for another purpose (like answering an email or using google maps for directions), I often quickly swipe any notification out of the way to finish what I am doing. On an apple device, this means that the notification is gone forever. If I don't think to look at it before swiping (which I rarely do because my mind is on something else at the moment), I have no idea why I was being notified. Sometimes, I can see it in the 20 last notifications on Hubitat, but in some instances, I don't get back to it within 20 notifications or I can't figure out which one it was. With an SMS, I always have the full history of messages until I decide to delete them. This is a serious question - not a judgement on your comment. I would really like to find a way to have meaningful alerts from Hubitat that I - not my apple device - can manage.
I did, and they didn't seem to like my responses for Opt-In and Opt-Out, nor pretty much my answers for ANY field. Everything was marked with red. I didn't even bother submitting a new one, I just put in a ticket.
The feedback was basically computer generated, it wasn't human responses, and they didn't seem to like my responses for pretty much ANY field. I just put in a ticket.
To your point, there are a couple of possible ways using custom apps within Hubitat Package Manager that might help, such as: File Manager Device (Device Driver to allow reading, writing, and appending of text based files in Hubitat's Local File Manager.) Dashboard Widgets (Allows you to add custom Widgets to Dashboards) Notification Tile Device (Device driver that can serve as a destination for notifications. Formats the notifications for display on an attribute tile.) PC Controller (Send Commands to your windows pc and get events from the pc. Uses a windows software called EventGhost)
There may be others, but this is a list of ones that could prove useful if you have a bit of time for tinkering. PC Controller for example could be used to send notifications to a dedicated machine that's listening for "events" (haven't used it so I'm not sure what that means). The File Manager one could allow you to write to a file on the Hubitat itself as an append log and then clean out the log every so often, BUT that will shorten the life of the built-in flash memory.
