Rachio Plugin (Locked)

[jay (support)]

Disable the plugin, wait 10minutes, and reenable the plugin - that seems to have gotten it back up for me. It does appear that there's some rate limiting going on, but I don't yet know what triggers it or what exactly I need to change in the plugin to avoid it. Hopefully I'll get some response.

Disabled the plug for a few hours and enabled again, and the error is gone.

Thank you for the suggestion!

JP

Mine is back again, pretty much every minute since 12:57am MST. Interesting that the very first message doesn't report a user error while all subsequent messages do:

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Feb 27, 2018 at 12:57:55 AM
   Rachio Sprinklers Error         Connection to Rachio API server failed with exception: HTTPError. Check the log file for full details.

Feb 27, 2018 at 12:58:56 AM
   Rachio Sprinklers Error         Connection to Rachio API server failed with exception: HTTPError. Check the log file for full details.
   Rachio Sprinklers Error         Error getting user data from Rachio via API.


I know you have a message in on the Rachio forums, just arming you with more info.

[jay (support)]

Yeah, nothing like shooting for a moving target. I'll see what I can do quickly without completely redesigning the calls.

[jay (support)]

Still nothing from Rachio, but apparently customers using the Control4 plugin are having the same issue. I'm trying to figure out how long it takes for the throttle deny to automatically clear. It appears it's longer than yesterday as I'm up to 10 minutes and that wasn't long enough.

If anyone is currently depending on their Rachio to perform correctly through Indigo, it might be a good idea to disable the plugin for the moment and schedule through the Rachio, at least until I can figure out what to do to avoid this and how long it takes to recover from a block.

It is at least a small consolation that the many of us aren't up to fill-time watering right now. I'm really quite disappointed in Rachio for not handling this better. This, IMO, is just another proof of point #3 in my Cloudiness of Things post. If we could talk directly to the Rachio controller rather than through their "cloud", we could avoid ALL THESE ISSUES.

If we could talk directly to the Rachio controller rather than through their "cloud", we could avoid ALL THESE ISSUES.

Such is the way of connected devices these days, but I agree. I would love for it to be a hybrid of cloud and local and I feel VERY much the same about the Nest products too. Very.

that's what I love about my heatmiser thermostat integration, it connects locally without going to the cloud.


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[jay (support)]

Update: it apparently takes 30 minutes of no activity before the API block is lifted (I know for a fact that it was shorter yesterday, so they are apparently still changing it). This kind of recovery time will require me to do some significant changes to the plugin to be able to deal with it in an automated fashion.

I think this is an unreasonable amount of time, and it makes it even more important that we figure out what causes a block and thus can avoid it since a 30 minute block delay could, in theory, cause 30 extra minutes of watering should a block occur when we use their API to either stop watering or to start the next zone.

So, at this point, I continue to recommend not using the plugin to control the sprinklers, until we get some more concrete information from Rachio.

So, at this point, I continue to recommend not using the plugin to control the sprinklers, until we get some more concrete information from Rachio.

It's winter, I'm good. What I'm worried about though is that this brand new purchase either gets the plugin abandoned because you say "oh heck no" and get something else or Rachio no longer is a viable and reliable option. I mean, the first time it runs for 24 hours because the API is unreachable.... and I mounted this on my wall and everything...

[jay (support)]

I'm hacking some stuff into the plugin to see if we can (in the short term) get it working again. It is most definitely a hack. I don't want to start on any long-term rate limiting code until I understand the characteristics of their throttling. I've posted AND sent them a support email so hopefully they will respond...

[jay (support)]

Well, we got a reply. They did implement throttling without telling anyone. SIGH.

The work I've done this far today won't help so I'm tossing that. I'm a bit surprised anyone (aside from me) is seeing failures because I don't think we're that close. If you have multiple copies of Indigo running with multiple plugin instances polling the same rachio (my issue) then it'll definitely trip the throttle.

I think, however, that if the threshold is only what she's outlined (1700 calls per day) then I can probably fix it just by bumping the poll interval to 2 minutes. I'll test that tonight and if it doesn't hang up I'll push out an update. If you want to try it, edit the plugin.py file in the plugin and change this line:

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DEFAULT_POLLING_INTERVAL        = 60

to:

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DEFAULT_POLLING_INTERVAL        = 120

Status changes from Rachio will only happen every 2 minutes. If Indigo is controlling, you should continue to get instant zone updates since we do those directly based on Indigo schedules. If Rachio is running any of it's schedules, information about those will be delayed a bit. Forecast data will update every 20 minutes unless you change the weather update interval. I'll update it in the release so it's still 10 minutes.

Longer term, it would be nice to use their webhooks to get status notifications so we don't have to poll at all (except maybe for forecast data). Unfortunately, at the moment that would require an IWS plugin and some other hacky stuff to get the data into the devices. It will be cleaner once we've done the IWS rewrite so I'm just going to table that until that is done.

Thanks Jay - I'll just wait for the official fix - turned mine off for now.

Silver lining for probably most of the users of this plugin is that it's winter and not a lot of watering going on - that and it's still functional via the app. If this happened in the middle of summer or beginning of spring it would likely be a bigger deal. Mine is disabled as well for now, not a big deal at all since there's still several inches of snow on my lawn .

In Florida it's watering season. We generally don't need to water in the summer because it rains a lot. But winter is dry season. I haven't installed my Rachio yet. Need to have an electrician install the outdoor enclosure for it because it needs to be hard-wired to power. Probably will get it done in March as I have several other things on the list for an electrician.

I'll be very disappointed if Rachio breaks Indigo integration. I ran it using their stuff for a while before the plugin, and while better than a dumb sprinkler, it still left a lot to be desired (Indigo seriously spoils us). Last year I had mine well tweaked to adjust/cancel/skip based on current conditions, measured rainfall over last few days, etc. Single zone triggering by CP worked well also on the fly.

I'm really hoping Jay can find a way to work around the new restrictions.

My system is still winterized, and I've got the plugin disabled while the system is turned off, so I don't have a feel for when the errors occur, or if in my setup I would be hitting these poll limits.