I’ve been having event issues (lights coming on when they shouldn’t, not coming on when they should), so I restored to factory default settings, reset my z-wave network, and re-paired everything.
Then tonight, I noticed that nothing was shutting off as it should, (not a surprise, timers haven’t ever worked for me), so I tried to manually shut them off via the Vera Dashboard, and I kept getting red power switch icons, and all the poll icons were gray. So I went to restart vera (like I have to do regularly to keep it communicating with my devices), and I noticed the dongle’s light was on solid. Which was odd, it’s usually always flashing for me until I unplug it. When I unplugged it this time, the light stayed solid, and no combination of button presses cured it. Could a faulty dongle have been the root of my problems all along, or does the solid light on the dongle mean something else?
So I left my Vera unplugged over night. Last night while unplugged the dongle’s light was still on solid. This morning, it was off so I plugged the unit back in, and the dongle was flashing again like it should (or has been in my case). When I checked the interface, it’s successfully polling devices again.
My question now is, did I just drain the battery in the dongle and have to replace it now, or is it rechargeable or something.
Also, is there an easier way to reset the dongle than letting it run dead? I have a feeling this is going to happen again.
Your not the only one having this problem with Vera not responding and noticing that the dongle is not flashing. I normally just reboot Vera and the dongle starts flashing again and Vera starts responding to z-wave commands/events.
We identified an issue. The .423 firmware is doing some more aggressive ‘network healing’, and it appears that sometimes the firmware in the dongle itself is locking up. Vera is not locked up; Vera is still fine. We’ve determined that you can remove/reinsert the dongle (ie power cycle the dongle) and then it should be back to normal. You do not need to reboot Vera. We’re trying to find the cause, and will have a new firmware soon to correct this.
scottresnik, all issues with timers/events should have been fixed in .423. If have a problem that lights come on when they shouldn’t, or events or timers don’t work, I would suggest that you go to Advanced, Logging, enable verbose logs (so the next time it happens we’ll have logs), and then when it happens again, click ‘Advanced’, ‘Tech Support’ and submit a trouble report soon after, and state what you expected to happen and what did/did not work and the time of the incident. Post the report ID on this thread and we’ll look at the logs and see what went wrong. We want to fix any problems right away, but, since we can’t reproduce any problems with timers/event, we can’t fix them unless we get a trouble report with the logs, or if you call/instant message us as soon as something doesn’t work as it should.
I’m as curious now as you were when you originally posted this question…
Does Vera’s Z-Wave dongle have a rechargeable battery? a watch battery?
Or does it utilize some non-battery mechanism - such as a “supercapacitor” - to hold a charge?
I never found an answer to this basic question anywhere in the Forum or Wiki.
As a computer tech, I’m familiar with those “watch batteries” draining after a few years of serving as CMOS backup, memory retention, etc. Normally, they are easy to replace.
Insofar as I haven’t heard a definitive answer about Vera’s dongle’s battery type, its expected shelf life, or instructions on replacement (including perhaps a cross-shipment of a new dongle when one poops out)…
…could MCV please let us know what the current specs and policies are?
We buy the dongle from an OEM supplier. I’ve been told that it has a rechargeable battery that, I believe, should effectively last the life of the product. I don’t have exact specifics. I’ll try to get them. Honestly none of us have even cracked open the dongle. The battery isn’t constantly charging/discharging, like say a mobile phone. You only use the battery during the initial setup for pairing devices, so I don’t think the battery gets a lot of use. My demo/dev box has a dongle that I use probably 3x a day to pair/unpair devices for 1 year (ie equivalent of 1,000 setups), and I’m still using the original dongle.
Is that problem really solved? I have the .78 dongle for two weeks now and the .616 release. With the new dongle came that problem. (But it seems to solve some others.)
Roughly every 28 hours the dongle has a solid blue light and not a single Z-Wave command goes through before unplug/plug.
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