Adding a device takes enormous time

Community Playground General Discussions
1

In first beta releases it usually took a minute or so for Vera to read devices changes from the stick and display it to the user.

Now it takes enormously long:

  • first it takes about a minute for Vera to merely recognize the stick was plugged back
  • then message about devices being configured appears for few minutes (not seconds!)
  • I tried to refresh, and click on Devices again - no new device appeared
  • so I went to have some coffee, and when I was back I saw a new device screen

I reproduced it few times, so it’s fairly consistent behavior, and I believe it may cause an unsuspicious user to get kind of angry.

Why does it take so long? Can’t new device be loaded ASAP, and the rest of the required activities (configuring, etc) to take place on background, transparent to the user?

2

This was actually a design decision based on some feedback. Vera does know right away that you have a new node, say node 9, and the general device class (a binary switch). But, Vera doesn’t know any specific information about the node, like the make/model/unique characteristics, until after Vera has successfully established contact with it and queried it’s capabilities. This can take a while, particularly if you have a lot of nodes and some are out of range and it takes 20 seconds or so of retries to timeout. In <320 firmwares, you could just keep working on the devices page while it’s being configured. The reason we stopped doing that is that some devices, like the ‘3-in-1 motion sensor’ actually change their type and the list of options changes. People found this very confusing. For example, you pair Vera with a 3-in-1 sensor, it shows up as a ‘generic i/o device’ with one set of options. Then, 60 seconds later, it disappears from the list, and re-appears as a ‘3-in-1’ with a different set of options. It looks to the user like a node got ‘lost’. So, we made a change that while Vera is busy configuring devices, you can’t edit the device settings. You can still control them, though, from the dashboard. Makes sense?

3

Sounds reasonable, thanks.
BTW, like the new UI!

4

It does sound reasonable, but there’s clear usability problem here: user is waiting for UI action when plugged the controller in, and it doesn’t happen. I’d say put a progress bar with clear message or status, or at least a clear message. Otherwise what will happen is after a couple of minutes of waiting user will start thinking something is wrong, he will pull USB stick out, plug it again, refresh screen numerous times, and eventually get “disappointed” :wink: