The Wink home automation thread

[MjnMixael]

It sucks that I have to get my hub fixed up... but I'm a big boy. I can get up off the couch to turn the lights off for a few days.

The good news is that we absolutely got confirmation that a highly requested feature is actively being worked on. (Local control)

Kaido, what was on your list of things you want for Wink? Local control, WinPhone support... what else? (Aside from outages )

Honestly, though... we haven't seen outages like this since September of last year. In fact, amidst all the negatives, I like to tally the positives. Since September we saw increased stability (until today), better lock control (battery status, code management), door sensors, motion sensors, water sensors, new products (tripper, tapt, outlink, to name a few), consistent hub and app upgrades, IFTTT support, etc. We've got Hue coming to robots soon, local control, there are some neat user experience things coming to the app soon.

My last wish list item that is still unaddressed is a hub with an ethernet port.

My point is, though, that this is a very fast moving company and they have done more in the last 8 months than most of the other tech companies I follow have done combined. So with that in mind, I'm unashamedly sticking with Wink for a while longer.

 

[smhawkes]

brinkbart might be the alias for Brian Knopf.

 

[Mike A.]

Oh please. Most of us will got through the upgrade program and just keep marching on as we always have been, hoping that the Wink system becomes everything it has promised to be. We can revisit this post in a month when this thread still has similar activity as it does now.

And when local control is activated, this thread will be filled with joyous applause for Wink, regardless of today's missteps.

A lot of those here may. The typical guy or gal who bought theirs at Home Depot or Amazon along with a bunch of other stuff (most of which is not particularly cheap) that they now can't control for a week or more by the time they send it out and back likely isn't going to be nearly as forgiving. Or real enthusiastic about recommending Wink to all of their friends and family. Nor are reviewers, competitors, and others familiar with other HA platforms who already pointed to the dependency on the network as a big potential issue. This puts that all in concrete.

If they can do local control, then they need to do it. Like yesterday.

 

[matt-wink]

Brian's comments were unacceptable. Period.

 

[Scottie Parr]

I'm very happy to have Wink. I travel and it's been huge peace of mind for me to control my lighting and be alerted to mail arrival. Before Wink, I would either leave the lights on or off for 10 days while I was away. It didn't work for me either way.

With Wink; I've had bulbs lose connection but it always came back. They've allowed me to be part of TestFlight and pushed the latest firmware to me within minutes. I've always known that an update could go bad and I've taken that chance. I'm blessed that my hub has been working since I got home this afternoon. In fact I now notice that my Hue bulbs show the correct status and color in their icon instead of the "?"

Been has been communicating and apologizing to everyone. I accept the apology. Now it's on you to accept it or not. The employee's rant was wrong but how is it right for most everyone here to be condescending jerks and feel that they are ok by it? Because he's the company and you're the consumer? Being a jerk is being a jerk no matter who you are. I come here to learn more about my app of choice / Wink. I'm all for honest case stories both good and bad but the constant crying really gets old. How many times can one person say they are leaving Wink but they never do? Please go. Leave and be happy. Wink is obviously not for you and it doesn't make sense for you to stay. It's simply not productive to come here and cry saying that you're leaving again, and again, and again. Are you really being clever saying that the email or the replacement will be all goofed up in what you say is typical for Wink? They say they are willing to take your hub and either replace it or repair it, whichever gets you back soonest. You aren't happy with it being fixed, you want new. I hope you find what you're looking for soon and can enjoy it working flawlessly, that way you won't have to spend 40,000 posts complaining anymore.

 

[MjnMixael]

A lot of those here may. The typical guy or gal who bought theirs at Home Depot or Amazon along with a bunch of other stuff (most of which is not particularly cheap) that they now can't control for a week or more by the time they send it out and back likely isn't going to be nearly as forgiving. Or real enthusiastic about recommending Wink to all of their friends and family. Nor are reviewers, competitors, and others familiar with other HA platforms who already pointed to the dependency on the network as a big potential issue. This puts that all in concrete.

If they can do local control, then they need to do it. Like yesterday.

I really don't think the topical guy or girl is going to home depot and buying home automation platforms at all yet. i suspect a huge majority of non-pro (Wink, Smartthings, Vera) HA users are some level of tech enthusiast. Many of us on this thread still joke about the "wife acceptance factor"! That's pretty telling in terms of who is even interested in really buying DIY HA yet.

 

[simple2010]

First off, I do work in tech and specifically "silicon valley" start-ups. With that in mind, I'm a little lenient when it comes to things like this. My background is QA, release and engineering management so I'm even more sensitive to massive failures like this. I lose sleep over the fear of deploying software to prod or app stores that have some fundamental problem I can't stop. With that in mind, ouch.

Presumably, there are several engineers and QA people having a very, very bad weekend. This is basically a worst case scenario for Wink besides unlocking everyone's doors and emailing criminals. If you're that QA guy/girl I'm thinking of right now, and reading this, my sympathy. Seriously though, what the hell were you guys thinking. There is no excuse to allow the product to get into a situation where you can't resolve it remotely. Even if you can't, offer up a direct firmware update that can be done by your users at home. I'm surprised QA hasn't used a way to flash directly and you can't use it in this case to avoid people shipping hardware back and forth. No loader? Scared to release something that allows future rooting? Stop being ridiculous and embrace open-source modding and your community. This probably would be solved already.

On the communication front, it makes my palms sweat to think of the desperate hangouts that took place and frantic calls. Let's mix up marketing / sales / engineering / QA and upper management into a frenzy of WTF happened. Offering a $50 voucher is just a joke. You need to save your users, and going through UPS shipping options is something you'd do a decade ago. Wow, just wow. You are seriously pulling hardware off the shelves?

I hate to throw people under the bus but here's a tire to the face. If you have people on staff that warned you, give them a raise and take them seriously. If nobody warned you this could happen, consider a re-org. This isn't some stupid game, your product controls lights, locks, doors etc. When it stops working, your users know right away something is up. This isn't candy crush, it's controlling serious elements of my home.

If I wasn't actively looking on this forum, my first notice of what happened would have been your ridiculous email basically saying "send it back." Holy crap you guys fucked up. So, tell me, why shouldn't I switch to a competitor? Should I consider it when Jack in the Box had an e.coli outbreak in '93? The funny thing with that disaster is at least in the near term, they were the safer bet for fast food due to waking up and instituting reform.

So, what the hell do I do? Send in this stupid hub or just get a competitor's setup. I ask the anandtech people that have at least read my rant, what do I lose switching to smart things? I have nest/protect, 20 GE links, 2x schlage and my-q garage. Can I just buy into ST and walk away from wink with limited impact?

Again, I feel bad for some of the employees. I'd be devastated and if you work for Wink and aren't, do yourself a favor and walk away. You may want to walk anyway.

 

[simple2010]

Well to be fair they're offering a $50 credit on Wink.com stuff.

So, what will everyone be putting that $50 towards? I haven't even looked yet.

 

[BillinGlendale]

My point is, though, that this is a very fast moving company and they have done more in the last 8 months than most of the other tech companies I follow have done combined. So with that in mind, I'm unashamedly sticking with Wink for a while longer.

I've had to substitute stand-alone lights to replace the Wink lights that are in the lighting fixtures, so it's a bit more extensive than turning on a switch for me. I do agree that I'll be sticking with Wink until something comes around that is proven better. I'm using Trunzoc's voice control and even bought a Android Ware watch to control my lighting, watches, etc; I'm pretty locked into the platform right now, and excepting today and minor problems with robots(geolocation); I'm generally happy with the Wink platform.

 

[tctmonkey]

First off, I do work in tech and specifically "silicon valley" start-ups. With that in mind, I'm a little lenient when it comes to things like this. My background is QA, release and engineering management so I'm even more sensitive to massive failures like this. I lose sleep over the fear of deploying software to prod or app stores that have some fundamental problem I can't stop. With that in mind, ouch.

Presumably, there are several engineers and QA people having a very, very bad weekend. This is basically a worst case scenario for Wink besides unlocking everyone's doors and emailing criminals. If you're that QA guy/girl I'm thinking of right now, and reading this, my sympathy. Seriously though, what the hell were you guys thinking. There is no excuse to allow the product to get into a situation where you can't resolve it remotely. Even if you can't, offer up a direct firmware update that can be done by your users at home. I'm surprised QA hasn't used a way to flash directly and you can't use it in this case to avoid people shipping hardware back and forth. No loader? Scared to release something that allows future rooting? Stop being ridiculous and embrace open-source modding and your community. This probably would be solved already.

On the communication front, it makes my palms sweat to think of the desperate hangouts that took place and frantic calls. Let's mix up marketing / sales / engineering / QA and upper management into a frenzy of WTF happened. Offering a $50 voucher is just a joke. You need to save your users, and going through UPS shipping options is something you'd do a decade ago. Wow, just wow. You are seriously pulling hardware off the shelves?

I hate to throw people under the bus but here's a tire to the face. If you have people on staff that warned you, give them a raise and take them seriously. If nobody warned you this could happen, consider a re-org. This isn't some stupid game, your product controls lights, locks, doors etc. When it stops working, your users know right away something is up. This isn't candy crush, it's controlling serious elements of my home.

If I wasn't actively looking on this forum, my first notice of what happened would have been your ridiculous email basically saying "send it back." Holy crap you guys fucked up. So, tell me, why shouldn't I switch to a competitor? Should I consider it when Jack in the Box had an e.coli outbreak in '93? The funny thing with that disaster is at least in the near term, they were the safer bet for fast food due to waking up and instituting reform.

So, what the hell do I do? Send in this stupid hub or just get a competitor's setup. I ask the anandtech people that have at least read my rant, what do I lose switching to smart things? I have nest/protect, 20 GE links, 2x schlage and my-q garage. Can I just buy into ST and walk away from wink with limited impact?

Again, I feel bad for some of the employees. I'd be devastated and if you work for Wink and aren't, do yourself a favor and walk away. You may want to walk anyway.

At YP, we call this a CLM. Career Limiting Move. I think your post is spot on.

 

[LegendKiller]

Where do you find this Facebook group? Be nice to watch the fireworks.

 

[brinkbart]

Where do you find this Facebook group? Be nice to watch the fireworks.

There's a link I used several posts up. Or just search Facebook for the Wink Users Group.

 

[simple2010]

At YP, we call this a CLM. Career Limiting Move. I think your post is spot on.

We've all had a bad weekend. If something goes out I'm responsible for it's HIPAA / medical and not dimming lights. That being said, I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight knowing I was part of the chain of failure. I filled out the form to get my return box. I guess that happened because I rebooted the hub today?

The next fun part is I tried the "WESOSORRY" code on wink.com and it's not even valid. haha. Sigh.

 

[tctmonkey]

We've all had a bad weekend. If something goes out I'm responsible for it's HIPAA / medical and not dimming lights. That being said, I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight knowing I was part of the chain of failure. I filled out the form to get my return box. I guess that happened because I rebooted the hub today?

The next fun part is I tried the "WESOSORRY" code on wink.com and it's not even valid. haha. Sigh.

fix.... use a fddi and side load the damn thing.

Have to say they really don't look like they know what they are doing.

 

[simple2010]

They don't want to open up methods publicly to flash. I think that's pretty obvious. The returned hubs will be flashed but they don't want you to know how they did it. I wonder how many units are in play now and how many will need to be repaired. The email implies we're talking about a few days but that seems unlikely if we're talking 10s of thousands of units. Better get in line quick!

 

[Kaido]

While we were able to recover and reconnect the majority of hubs, many of our users with Wink Hubs were emailed and asked to return their hub and await a replacement.

Additionally, we are immediately suspending all sales of Wink Hubs across all retail channels. We expect to resume sales within the week.

Well, looks like mine is shot:

Bummer. Hub is simply "offline". It's funny because I had lock lag the other day, which is scary due to it being a security issue, especially if you live in a bad neighborhood, but I understand that local control is coming soon, so at least unlocking it from my parking lot via wifi should be instant when that comes out. Then I went for a walk with my wife & tried to turn on the porch light with my iPhone, wouldn't even take. I'm scared to tell me family that the hub is now shot because I know I'm going to get laughed at

Has anyone dug into their equipment much? Specifically, do you have to re-pair your Pico remotes to your Lutron lights? iirc they were originally paired straight to the light, but then got paired to Wink for pass-through command relaying. I'm on-call this weekend so won't be home much to check out my hub or mess with the lights

 

[Kaido]

I am no stranger to alpha and beta testing product, but if a consumer goes to Home Depot and buys something off the shelf, there is a reasonable expectation that the product is going to work. If you buy a hammer and is shatters when you hit a nail. Would the excuse of the hammer being at rev .77 be adequate?

Yup. I've talked a few friends into Wink & have more or less regretted it because now I'm tech support I've since held off on recommending anything other than Control4 at this point, at least until either Wink pushes out the local control update or until Samsung releases the STv2 hub (annnnnnnd until is is confirmed working properly! lol).

It is what it is. Home automation is a difficult arena to get right; even the big boys don't have it nailed (the $50k systems sometimes have similar glitches to Wink, ask any Crestron user). The difficulty happens when someone, like you said, walks into Home Depot & expects a stable, working product off the shelf, and doesn't get it. I recognize that Wink has made progress since inception, and also have been in home automation long enough to know that nothing is perfect.

Right now, I have no desire to get into the politics of the behind-the-scenes company stuff. ALL companies work like that behind closed doors; Wink is just a little bit more public about it. As they are a growing company and are partnered with bigger companies (GE + HD), I'm sure they will learn from this mistake & never do it again. I see this in movies & cartoons all the time...henchman screws up, boss kills him out of frustration to make an example, rather than letting him learn from the mistake so he'll be an even better employee in the future.

We're still in Wink's first year of operation (released July 2014 iirc), so I'm going to chalk it up to growing pains. It is annoying having the occasional glitch, and it is frustrating having a bricked unit & having to send it back for repair, particularly if you were relying on that system for home security (door sensors, window sensors, motion detectors, water alarm detectors, smoke & fire alarms, etc.).

I still think it's a better solution than the STv1 hub. To the users jumping ship right now, be aware that you're going to run into similar issues with the current SmartThings hub...I would recommend holding out until Samsung releases version two. You'll be doing even more tinkering with the SmartThings hub, which is fine if that's the road you want to go down, but don't expect it to be a smooth experience since the technology level just isn't there yet (it's better in some aspects, but worse in some regards).

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Brian's comments were unacceptable. Period.

When can we expect a public apology from Brian? I have never seen more embarrassing behavior from an employee in a public forum during a crisis.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Got the "we need to replace your hub" email. Perfect timing since I am going to be going on vacation in a few days and was going to use Wink to automate some light schedules while I was gone. (Yeah, that was sarcasm).

I wish they would just refund me the cost of the hub. At this point I'd even take $25 for it. Guess my replacement will be going on eBay.

 

[quagga]

If you're looking for the email and it hasn't shown up, ask the other users you may have on your hub.

I'm the hub's owner, but the email went to my wife who's also on the hub. My thought is she has alphabetical superiority (her email/name start with an A).

It's a rough weekend for Wink.

 

[quagga]

fix.... use a fddi and side load the damn thing.

Have to say they really don't look like they know what they are doing.

They said on twitter the code was being abused so they had to nuke it (which makes sense since it pretty much gave everyone $50 free).

The tweet: http://twitter.com/TheWinkApp/status/589672910631079936

 

[quagga]

I wish they would just refund me the cost of the hub. At this point I'd even take $25 for it. Guess my replacement will be going on eBay.

I don't know they're going to replace it. From the email, it sounds like they're going to re-flash the existing hub. That would make more sense since I imagine that could in theory get around the "you now have to re-pair every single item you have to your hub" drill.

Of course if you had a rooted hub, you're probably out of luck since this "update" would probably kill the root.

 

[Kaido]

Ouch, it reached Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/19/wink-home-automation-hub-bricked/

 

[JFHughes08088]

It sucks that I have to get my hub fixed up... but I'm a big boy. I can get up off the couch to turn the lights off for a few days.

The good news is that we absolutely got confirmation that a highly requested feature is actively being worked on. (Local control)

Kaido, what was on your list of things you want for Wink? Local control, WinPhone support... what else? (Aside from outages )

Honestly, though... we haven't seen outages like this since September of last year. In fact, amidst all the negatives, I like to tally the positives. Since September we saw increased stability (until today), better lock control (battery status, code management), door sensors, motion sensors, water sensors, new products (tripper, tapt, outlink, to name a few), consistent hub and app upgrades, IFTTT support, etc. We've got Hue coming to robots soon, local control, there are some neat user experience things coming to the app soon.

My last wish list item that is still unaddressed is a hub with an ethernet port.

My point is, though, that this is a very fast moving company and they have done more in the last 8 months than most of the other tech companies I follow have done combined. So with that in mind, I'm unashamedly sticking with Wink for a while longer.

+1. Couldn't agree more.

 

[quagga]

Ouch, it reached Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/19/wink-home-automation-hub-bricked/

Usually bricking hardware "auto-magically" for your customers earns a company some media coverage in the tech press.