Is there any way to determine if an Aeon Smart switch loses power and then send an alert on a VeraEdge. I have a need to be able to tell when one outlet has lost power (breaker blows) and then get an alert for it. I’m open to other solutions as well, if there is something that will work for this other than the Aeon Smartswitch.
The issue is that when the power fails, the smartswitch does not receive anymore power either and as such is unable to send a ‘no power’ type yell at Vera (providing vera is on a UPS) What you would really need is a smartswitch with built-in UPS.
Your simplest way would be an old Android smart phone or a tablet on charger 24/7. With a Tasker profile that detects when the device goes from charge to battery (loss of mains power) and then sets eg a multiswitch on Vera to indicate power failure.
So then there is not another way to “ping” a device…any device…to be able to tell when it goes away? If I could poll the Aeon switch and determine that it was no longer there, then that would indicate power failure.
There is several ways to ping a network device. The Ping Sensor Plugin in VERA would be the easiest and cheapest. If you plug any IP wired or wireless device in that outlet, set it to a static IP and have the ping sensor ping that device you would be good to go.
This is assuming that the vera, modem, router, switches and everything else still has power.
Is there a way, with PLEG, that I can determine if a z-wave device becomes unresponsive? I can do this with a network device and the ping sensor, but that means buying something I can ping. I do use the ping sensors to ping my phones and auto arm the dsc panel when the phones are gone, so I am familiar with that.
I’m unsure, but maybe you can “POLL” a device and use that response?
If that don’t work I know you can turn it on/off, have pleg check if it turned on. For example even if you had a an outlet without nothing plugged into it, vera/PLEG knows if its on or off. It keeps timestamps. You can set up a auto on/off to happen on this switch every so often and setup a condition that if the outlet hasn’t turned on or off in a set time frame the device is not responding.
I know you want to buy nothing else, but most people find the solid way of doing what your doing is using a 12v relay, a 12v wall wort or phone charger with the end cut off or some sort and using a z-wave door sensor wired to the relay. If power is lost the relay returns to normally open and it trips the door sensor. This will cost around 40 bucks or so tho.
A cheap rasberry pi can be multi purposed to connect to the network (ping sensor) and plugged into the outlet. I use one to run a hue Bridge and it’s stuffed away. It’s not mission critical and will return to work after power is restored.
I had an extra ROKU laying around and I set this up with a ping sensor. It notifies me when the outlet loses power and then notifies me when power returns. A pi would do this as well and I might try that later. Thanks for the help.
From what I understand, there is no generic way to do that, due to the way z-wave is designed, because a fully functional device may decide to stop responding to requests (to save battery or to reduce network traffic) and only wake up periodically or when it decides to send an unsolicited event.
But you can configure the wake up interval, and you can check which command classes the device responds to by reading its documentation.
So you might be able to request something from the device and trigger an event upon timeout…
The ping sensor is the answer for me in this case. Use your favorite cheap device to ping and then set an alert to tell you what is happening. As stated above, I’ve used an extra ROKU. However, a raspberri pi or beagle board or old junk pc could do the same thing. Anything that has networking and is pingable can work for this.
Sorry for my lack of understanding, but I am in a similar issue. I want to be notified when my sump pump GFCI is tripped. It sounds like your ROKU/RPI ping idea might work, but I have NO IDEA how to do this. Can you give me a little advice where to start to set this up. Thanks!
Sorry for my lack of understanding, but I am in a similar issue. I want to be notified when my sump pump GFCI is tripped. It sounds like your ROKU/RPI ping idea might work, but I have NO IDEA how to do this. Can you give me a little advice where to start to set this up. Thanks![/quote]
I have already suggested this idea to you in your thread.
You need from the vera app store the free ping sensor.
You need a network devices IP address and it needs to be set to a static ip or even better have a ip reservation set in your homes router. This way that device is always the same ip when it is connected to your network. You then enter the ip address of that device into the ping sensor plugin and that pliging will keep checking or pining that device until it doesn’t respond and when it doesn’t it will change the status on that ping sensor plugin. Which u can make a notification off of.
This works with just about any network device. Just make sure that device is pluged into that outlet your checking on and that devuce doesn’t run on battery backup. So when power is lost that device will fail to respond to pings.