Detecting Devices / Monitoring Connections (especially battery devices)

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I did a search to see if I could find previous discussions about this, but was unable to find anything, so hopefully this hasn’t been discussed before and I just missed it…

I’m trying to figure out how to a) check the connection to a battery powered device, b) monitor the connection – i.e. get a better sense of how often it can reach the rest of the network, and how often it can’t. I can’t seem to figure out how to do that for a battery device. For a wall powered/“always on” device I can manually poll it and MCV will tell me if it is unable to reach the device. But for a battery powered device, unless I wake it up, MCV always says it is unable to reach the device (which is understandable if it is “asleep” and not listening for connections).

I currently have a switch that is in a very inaccessible location, so I can’t just “wake it up” to see how it is doing.

I think a simple solution would be to be able to see any “pings” that come from the sensor that z-wave devices supposedly do from time to time, but I’m not aware of a way to do that in MCV.

Any suggestions? Is there something obvious that I’m not looking at?

Thanks,

—Lawrence

2

Try the datamine plugin and see if you can log the poll times on the graph datamine comes with. I think battery devices by default are around 3 hours before the wake up again but that can be changed by yourself if you wanted.

3

Vera records the timestamp when a battery-operated Z-Wave device last woke-up and communicated. This is saved in the device variable LastWakeup.

The ServiceID is urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:ZWaveDevice1.

You could use PLEG or Lua code to periodically check this against the current time and alert/alarm if it exceeds the normal wake-up time.