This had been a series of three twitter posts for a day in which the Fitbit, Garmin and Cycliq devices all stuffed up – but then the that night the Wemo joined in so I thought it justified a post to, once again, show how unreliable the average commercial smart devices/IOT are.
Shit firmware day; 1 of 3. The fitbit Inspire HR goes black-screen for most of the day, I can tell its still working ‘cos it is still synching to my phone, but there’s no display until I take it off for an hour and wait. It does this every month or so, everything still works, but the screen stays completely black. Usual fix I’ve found is to take it off and leave it on the charger for an hour or two, even though the app says there’s plenty of charge in it. Fitbit support tell me to “perform a reset and then you’ll be able to reconnect from your phone” – clearly indicating that they’re unable to read.
Shit firmware day; 2 of 3. The Garmin Edge805 decides that somehow I manage to ride 38km between turning it on and pedalling. Ride ends up being “max spd 38km/hr”, “avg spd 78.1km/hr”. With various degrees of difficulty I can trim the recorded rides in Strava and the Garmin Connect website to only include the sensible part, but the device itself keeps a record that this was “my fastest 40km”
Shit firmware day; 3 of 3. The dangerous one. The Cycliq Fly12 headlight & bike camera decides to scramble an SD card (again) while I’m out on a ride, then turns half-off – no light, no camera – and stays latched up with no headlight, fully charged & an orange LED until I can get home and poke a pin in the reset hole.
Then to top it off, that night at 10 pm the Wemo light decided not to turn off, so I had to manually turn it off. It’s on a schedule to come on at sundown and turn off at bedtime, it runs for months, then sometimes decides to either not turn on… or not turn off. Usually I manually turn it on – or off – and it then keeps going as though nothing untoward had happened. Recent updates seem to have made it more reliable than it was some .
Update
- : the Wemo light turned on at sundown, and once again failed to turn off at 10 pm. Once again I turned it off via the app.
- : This morning I opened up the Wemo app, disabled and re-enabled the scheduled event. Tonight it turned on, but again, did not turn off at 10 pm.
- : Today the Wemo light is obviously sulking, it refused to come on at sundown, about an hour later I manually turned it on. It did turn itself off at 10 pm though.
- : Perhaps it’s working again. It came on at the right time. Will it turn off? Yes, it did. Maybe its back to working again.. for a while.
