Beginners trouble with Vera Edge and motion sensor etc

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

Hi!

I’m new to the Z-wave scene, and recently purchased a few things to get started. However, it’s not exactly problem free this far and I would like to ask you all some questions to better understand what’s going on. I am a programmer so I’m not afraid of tweaking and fixing things here and there… but I’m a bit puzzled when things don’t work as expected, or work the second or third time even if you do the same thing :wink:

I have a very basic setup for testing right now:

  • Vera Edge (firmware 1.7.906)
  • Fibaro Motion Sensor (FGMS001)
  • TKBHome on/off plug (TZ68)

The first problem I have is that after I connected the Motion sensor to the system everything worked fine for a while. After a short while (minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less) the Vera UI says “Can’t detect device”. The first few times it happened I tried re-adding it but the last couple of times I noticed it actually is still working, because I can make it trigger a scene anyway. But why is it saying it can’t detect it then? I did a few times also have issues where it stopped working and I had to re-configure it. A bit inconsistent in my mind…

The second problem is with my second device, the on/off plug. I had it not far away from the Edge (like 6m) and all of a sudden I couldn’t flip it on/off anymore. Moving it really close made it work again. Could it be interference with something in my home that causes range problems? Z-wave in general should have a far longer range as I have understood it.

The third issue I ran into was when I created my first scene. I told the scene not to notify anyone when triggered (default). But still I got both email and sms when it was triggered. I armed the Fibaro Motion sensor and then triggered it. But still, the scene clearly stated no-one should be notified. Enabling notification didn’t help, so it wasn’t inverted at least. Could it be my general User Settings that cause these notifications to happen? I have filled in cell phone and email there as information on how to reach me, but I wouldn’t expect those settings to force notifications on all triggers.

In general though, it’s great to finally start playing around with these things. It’s cool when things work, like triggering motion to flip a light switch. I would be very happy to get some answers so I can make more sense of what’s actually happening :wink:

Sincerely,
/ Mattias

#2

[quote=“Mad, post:1, topic:185414”]The first problem I have is that after I connected the Motion sensor to the system everything worked fine for a while. After a short while (minutes, sometimes more, sometimes less) the Vera UI says “Can’t detect device”. The first few times it happened I tried re-adding it but the last couple of times I noticed it actually is still working, because I can make it trigger a scene anyway. But why is it saying it can’t detect it then? I did a few times also have issues where it stopped working and I had to re-configure it. A bit inconsistent in my mind…[/quote]I’m not sure what is happening here. I’m not understanding your description. You should know though that, battery operated devices like motion sensors sleep most of the time. When there is motion, they wake for an instant and send a message to Vera, but they immediately gop back to sleep. This conserves battery. It also makes it so that if you try to poll or configure the device from Vera, you will fail to reach the device. “Can’t detect device” is not familiar to me, but I don;t use UI7.

The second problem is with my second device, the on/off plug. I had it not far away from the Edge (like 6m) and all of a sudden I couldn't flip it on/off anymore. Moving it really close made it work again. Could it be interference with something in my home that causes range problems? Z-wave in general should have a far longer range as I have understood it.
It is entirely possible that interference or obstructions are limiting your range to 6 meters. The advertised distances are best case scenario and are rarely accomplished in the real world.
#3

First 2 points could both be related to signal problems if it a very weak signal may miss the polling I’m no expert on that stuff still learning myself. with the last point around notifications may be due to the mode settings where you select home away vacation etc each profile has a toggle for select which users get notified of alarms tripped when armed etc so may be that is sending the alerts not your scene.