Does turning on a switch by physically toggling it cause an event to which Vera can respond by doing ? I’m willing to include Lua code as an option. Or, do I need to use a scene controller?
For example, 4 lights on sunset to midnight timers. One on a switch, three on receptacles. Last person downstairs heads up to bed early, shuts off the stair light. I want the lights plugged into the receptacles to go off as well and I want to minimize hardware cost. I’ll make a scene called <stuff to shut off if it isn’t already off and we’re going to bed>. The Leviton two scene controller that can also do direct control would perfectly suit this, but if I can cough up some Lua to make happen and use a dumb switch, I’m smiling.
@Sleeve,
Use the (Add Event) functionality of a Scene in Vera to tie things like “when this light is turned off” to trigger the steps in the scene.
What you’ve described can be done declaratively in Vera’s UI.
You don’t need a separate Scene controller [Zwave] device to do this. If you did have a SC, the advantage is that it will work even if Vera goes down (for whatever reason). In my setup I have both Scene-controller driven examples of what you’re doing (with Vera programming the Scene controller for me) as well as ones that Vera is directly involved in (because the specific ZWave device isn’t Scene aware)
Sweet, thank you for that help, I can see that I’m going to be able to do the things I want with Vera. I need to get through my last dozen or so non-Vera related questions and get this stuff in my hands and see it working. I don’t want to ask non-Vera questions here since I see everyone stays relevant to Vera only and my questions are about selecting specific brands. I can understand MCV might not want to host a forum where vendors are compared because it could damage partner relations.
You can likely also get a good sense for what folks are using by looking at the footers that folks use in the forums.
A number of folks use this to “show” what they have running in their houses (etc) and it’s surprising the commonality (and also the diversity) of what’s being used out there.
That said, the more “off the beaten path” you go, the harder it is to get support. Whilst the common stuff often works, there are some interesting devices out there that don’t work well with Vera yet (like the Minimote)
So now that I’ve converted from lurker to owner, the real questions start.
I have two Leviton dimmers in my kitchen, one for overhead spots and one for under cabinet lights. I’ve created a scene with an event trigger on turning on the overheads and a command of turning on the undercabinets to 75%. When I turn on the overheads using their dimmer switch, the under cabinet lights do not turn on. I’ve tried including and excluding the overheads from the commands in the scene. If I turn on the overheads from Vera UI, the undercabinets come on.
The overheads have only one neighbor right now, node 1, and a stress test shows all 10 direct pings fail. However, the overhead dimmer is 1/4 of an inch from the undercabinet dimmer so why wouldn’t the overhead see the undercab (node 7) as a neighbor? And the receptacle in the next room 15 feet away? And the receptacle across the kitchen that turns on the nightlight?
Any actual commands from Vera reach the overhead dimmer on the first attempt. Do I need to do a network repair? Remember, day 2 with Vera, think noob. UI3, 1.1.228.
This is caused by the default polling interval, which is 60s. When using Vera’s UI, the polling is done automatically when triggering a scene/event/timer or Lua code. But for physically interactions, it’s not the same. If you wait 60s, you will see that undercabinets light will come on as well.
The polling interval can be changed for each device, but small values for a lot of devices will decrease the performance.
So the switch, which is two-way, doesn’t send notification that its state has changed and the only way to respond to events in the real world physical switches is to hyperactively poll and clog the network or just wait for the eventual reaction? You’ve seriously got no event coming back to Vera that the state of the switch has changed by physical contact? On a two way Leviton?
So if I understand this correctly, that means that a scene controller and a motion sensor are totally on their own to cause the reaction in the devices they control by broadcasting their own commands? But see, I already know that contradicts the MCV guidance for how to set up scene controllers and motion sensors. You tell us to send the action back to Vera.
If we’re sending sensor and controller actions back to Vera and it acts, why can’t Vera react to contact with a switch that has the ability to tell Vera it’s been touched? Is this a current release of software limitation or did my plans for using z-wave just shrink by half across my home?
Maybe in guessed’s response above there was an implied tolerance of sitting around waiting. I’m looking for more of a bing, bang, boom pace of reaction. It doesn’t have to be immediate, but it should take less than 5 seconds and I’m being generous because really this technology should only need 2 seconds to detect and respond.
Who would deploy a motion sensor that takes more than 5 seconds to light a bulb? Why do we send motion events back to Vera if Vera can’t respond to physical world actions?
Also, do I understand neighbors right? Should each device have a list of all devices that are within its reach? Since I have two dimmers in the same two gang box and one can see the other but not vice versa, would that indicate a need to repair network?
So the switch, which is two-way, doesn't send notification that its state has changed and the only way to respond to events in the real world physical switches is to hyperactively poll and clog the network or just wait for the eventual reaction? You've seriously got no event coming back to Vera that the state of the switch has changed by physical contact? On a two way Leviton?
Lutron has a patent on a light switch that reports when the status has changed, and Lutron has been aggressively going after anybody else who makes a light switch that does that. For this reason, Leviton and all other ZWave manufacturers have had to make their switches NOT report when they are manually toggled by the user. With Leviton only (not with the other manufacturers), there is a proprietary, non-ZWave compliant way to sort of work around the patent. Our current Vera builds do support this most of the way, and, we’ve recently begun to work more closely directly with Leviton’s engineers to find all the “secrets” of their devices and improve this interaction in future firmwares.
I plan on getting those, if Vera does support it. If Vera doesn’t due to the reasons you explained, then I might go Leviton if you are currently working with them.
Glad to read this post on leviton details… I am just starting to get into buying more ‘stuff’. Picked up
my first leviton the other day. Not the cheapest, but they seem to have a lot of nice features. Figured
I was better off paying a bit more and having options that I may want down the road when things get
going with my setup.
So the switch, which is two-way, doesn’t send notification that its state has changed and the only way to respond to events in the real world physical switches is to hyperactively poll and clog the network or just wait for the eventual reaction? You’ve seriously got no event coming back to Vera that the state of the switch has changed by physical contact? On a two way Leviton?
Lutron has a patent on a light switch that reports when the status has changed, and Lutron has been aggressively going after anybody else who makes a light switch that does that. For this reason, Leviton and all other ZWave manufacturers have had to make their switches NOT report when they are manually toggled by the user. With Leviton only (not with the other manufacturers), there is a proprietary, non-ZWave compliant way to sort of work around the patent. Our current Vera builds do support this most of the way, and, we’ve recently begun to work more closely directly with Leviton’s engineers to find all the “secrets” of their devices and improve this interaction in future firmwares.[/quote]
zmistro, was your comment about association something I can enable or did you mean that as a solution for the devs to use?
All, I’ve read Ovidiu’s comment above about a lot of devices at short polling times, and I wonder if two switches polling every 5 seconds is reasonable. The rest, about 30 devices, will poll at default 60 second pace. The ping times on the two devices are both averaging 200ms and they are 100% reachable according to my last repair report. I won’t have a lot of retry traffic on these two.
Should I just plan on using scene controllers for immediate reactions? Is a solution to the reaction problem fairly close for Levitons and I can get away with using handheld remotes and smartphones for a few months without hard wiring load capable scene controllers? Or is it reasonable to have a very limited number of fast polled devices?
What are all you veterans doing regarding reacting to polled changes?
Oh, and in UI3, do I change the value on the device’s Settings tab labeled “Poll this node at most every ____ seconds?” Not the ideal label for that field, because it sort of sounds to me like if you set the whole system to 60 second polling, you could set certain devices to poll once every 5 minutes with this. It doesn’t seem intuitive to think about an “at most” setting that you set lower than the system default, but I’m probably guilty of thinking about it more than I should.
So the switch, which is two-way, doesn’t send notification that its state has changed and the only way to respond to events in the real world physical switches is to hyperactively poll and clog the network or just wait for the eventual reaction? You’ve seriously got no event coming back to Vera that the state of the switch has changed by physical contact? On a two way Leviton?
Lutron has a patent on a light switch that reports when the status has changed, and Lutron has been aggressively going after anybody else who makes a light switch that does that. For this reason, Leviton and all other ZWave manufacturers have had to make their switches NOT report when they are manually toggled by the user. With Leviton only (not with the other manufacturers), there is a proprietary, non-ZWave compliant way to sort of work around the patent. Our current Vera builds do support this most of the way, and, we’ve recently begun to work more closely directly with Leviton’s engineers to find all the “secrets” of their devices and improve this interaction in future firmwares.[/quote]
does this effect the ACT devices- i think they use “associations” to notify the controller and they have since way before luytron sold anything. (so i just guess that lutron couldn’t have patented that approach unless they happened to come up with it before act did.)
To avoid any issues in regards to the Lutron patent, ACT has turned off Group 1 associations (instant status) in their devices as of at least six months ago.
[quote=“Sleeve, post:14, topic:165769”]zmistro, was your comment about association something I can enable or did you mean that as a solution for the devs to use?
All, I’ve read Ovidiu’s comment above about a lot of devices at short polling times, and I wonder if two switches polling every 5 seconds is reasonable. The rest, about 30 devices, will poll at default 60 second pace. The ping times on the two devices are both averaging 200ms and they are 100% reachable according to my last repair report. I won’t have a lot of retry traffic on these two.
Should I just plan on using scene controllers for immediate reactions? Is a solution to the reaction problem fairly close for Levitons and I can get away with using handheld remotes and smartphones for a few months without hard wiring load capable scene controllers? Or is it reasonable to have a very limited number of fast polled devices?
What are all you veterans doing regarding reacting to polled changes?
Oh, and in UI3, do I change the value on the device’s Settings tab labeled “Poll this node at most every ____ seconds?” Not the ideal label for that field, because it sort of sounds to me like if you set the whole system to 60 second polling, you could set certain devices to poll once every 5 minutes with this. It doesn’t seem intuitive to think about an “at most” setting that you set lower than the system default, but I’m probably guilty of thinking about it more than I should.[/quote]
I am also interested in hearing what others are doing to allow manual control of the switch to activate another zwave device. I am moving into a new home (first home) in about 20 days. I am researching on which system to get and this is one of the concerns/questions I have with the z-wave systems.
