I have various lighting scenes which I use to turn several lights on or off at once. Some are manually triggered, some are motion triggered. All pretty simple stuff.
One annoyance though is that when one of these scenes is activated, Vera seems to turn the lights on one at a time, sequentially. Ie, there’s a small but noticeable delay between each light turning on. Is this normal? I’ve not included any delay between devices when setting up the scenes. I’m expecting them to all switch on or off at once.
Does anyone else see this behavior and is there a solution or just the way Vera works?
I have the same experience, I think this is normal. Some appliance switches switch more or less at the same time, other devices (lightwave lights) sometimes take a little longer. But in general I have the same. To the extent my Vera gets very slow (I think my cpu is overloaded as it shows 110% occasionally), and devices can take 30 or 40 seconds to react. If I then run a scene it can take a minute or so for everything to switch on, which is very annoying
Assuming your scene does not consist of delayed actions…
Vera issues Z-Wave commands in series, one after the other. Each command has an acknowledgment reply before the command is complete and then next is issued. With a properly tuned and functioning Z-Wave network, this can result in many commands seeming to happen at the same time, nearly instant, even though they are happening in a serial fashion. (The exception to this is the Z-Wave All Off command.)
However, if your Z-Wave network is not functioning correctly, or the commands have to be routed through several hops, or your Vera is under heavy load, the time between initiation and completion of each command can become more pronounced.
I am not clear form your description if this is only happening with one scene and not with others. If that is the case, I would suggest recreating the scene.
Something else that sometimes happens is that a device might be at the end of a “long route” and is generally slow. If that device is called early in the scene, it can slow down the entire scene, sometimes by several seconds. When this happens, if you exclude the device and include it again then add it back to the scene, it will be placed at the end of the “execution queue” and the delay it brings will be far less noticeable.
@Z-Waver
I think you’ve answered it as you stated commands are issued in series and waits for an acknowledgement from each device before activating the next. This is certainly how it seems to be working and yes, the behavior described applies to all my scenes and all device routes are excellent (my network is not very complex or wide spread).
Before using Vera I was using a software based solution and running similar scenes would activate all devices (it seemed) in parallel (all switched on/off at once) so this is what I’ve been used to and is a much better solution to me. I can’t say how it was achieving this though.
[quote=“sm2117, post:5, topic:187219”]Before using Vera I was using a software based solution and running similar scenes would activate all devices (it seemed) in parallel (all switched on/off at once) so this is what I’ve been used to and is a much better solution to me. I can’t say how it was achieving this though.[/quote]I think you might be mistaken. There is an All On/Off Z-Wave command, a single broadcast command, that could have been in use. But, all Z-Wave controllers, that I am aware of, use serialized commands, so any scene that switched multiple devices, without the All On/Off command would have been serial. The Aeon Z-Stick, I presume that’s what you used with your software, can only transmit one command at a time.
I think that you should look deeper into repairing your Z-Wave network. Whether it is a matter of Heal operations or adding more nodes to improve routing, or starting completely fresh. Most scenes should switch devices near instantly. You may, or may not, be able to detect the serialization but the scene(unless it is for a LOT of devices) should complete execution within one second. If it takes longer than that, something needs fixing.
For example, I have a sunset scene that switches ~30 devices, receptacles, switches, dimmers, appliance modules, . When it fires, you can hear switches clicking and thunking all over the house, not all simultaneously. But, it’s complete in about one second, maybe two.
Yeah OK. Thanks for the explanation. I’ll take a deeper look.
Whilst on the topic of diagnostics, are there any tools you can recommend which present a graphical representation of your zwave network, along with neighbor response times, reception etc? I know I can get this detail manually but a single view would be fantastic.