One of my main reasons for using Vera is for the Schlage Link. My system will ultimately be implemented over 21 buildings (21 Vera’s) and around 41 locks ultimately (and probably door sensors, cameras, thermostats, water sensors, temp. sensors, etc.). Right now I just have two buildings with 2 Vera’s and 7 Locks total (I am concentrating first on one building with 6 locks). I have read pretty much every message in all of the Forum’s and probably about 25% of the Wiki. Vera is running 1.0.899 firmware and I haven’t swapped the dongles yet, they are 2.64 L:1 currently. I am 300 miles away from the physical location so I have to use findvera.com to access the system.
At some point (before upgrading the firmware to 899) I was going to Notifications (not Luup Notifications) at findvera.com’s home page and clicking on one of the locks to see the audit trail of the lock (there are a bunch of devices there that I have hidden, I assume every time I renamed a device and there was an event/notification it was saved under that name, I also assume since I had a hard time enrolling the locks and relays caused a lot of misc. devices to be listed there, it would be nice if those could be erased somehow). When clicking on the lock it would bring up a calendar where I could click on a day and it would show me what time that lock was locked and unlocked and what code was used.
Now I assume I need to click on Luup events to see this information (because under both Notifications and Luup Notifications there is no new data). Only now it just says what time door lock opened or door lock closed, nothing about what code was used, nothing about how the door was locked or unlocked (I would like to know if a code was used and what code, whether the lock was locked from the inside or outside if the lock is capable of that and if it was locked or unlocked from the inside and if it was locked or unlocked by the key).
I have set up 6 scenes under the “room” which I called Building 6. They are tamper events if the a bad code is repeatedly entered into each lock it will email me. That part is working fine and the notification for the 1 test I had my maintenance guy perform shows up under Luup Notifications.
My questions are;
I am not sure I understand the difference between Scenes and events, I assume an event is something that happens to/by a device and a scene is what is triggered by that “event”.
Is there somewhere that shows all the activity with the locks that I just am not finding or do I have to go through and manually set up these scenes for every thing I want to show up in the log? I don’t want to be emailed every single time a door is locked or unlocked (Can you imagine the amount of emails for 40+ doors of a resort with people constantly going in and out?), but I want to be able to go back a month from now and look at that data if I need to and have it somewhere.
I am sure I didn’t cover everything, but hopefully someone can help me out and steer me in the right direction.
Great questions, Scott, and I’ll do my best to keep my observations brief:
MCV, brilliant as they are, has a nomenclature problem. You will find the term “Events” is used to descibe (a) device activity, (b) notifications listed on FindVera, or (c) something that triggers a Scene. The correct use of “Events” is (c).
The “Events” and “Luup Events” listed at FindVera should technically be called “Logs” (because that’s what Vera calls these items), or at the very least “Activity” (so normal people understand what they’re seeing).
“Notifications” and “Luup Notifications” currently don’t bring you to the same place on FindVera.com – the former mysteriously leads to a list of “Events”, while the latter correctly leads to a list of Notifications (email and/or SMS) sent by Vera.
Although Vera knows the difference between a Schlage LiNK lock being locked/unlocked from the inside or outside, this distinction is not currently indicated among the “Events” you see at FindVera.com. The only way to distinguish inside from outside is to set up Scenes - as you surmised above - and have the Scenes (named, for example, “Door Locked from Inside”) send Notifications to you, which is a clumsy and ugly work-around.
EXAMPLE:
Scene 1: “Unlocked from Inside” > Device: Schlage Lock > Event Type: “A door is opened or closed” > Event Name: “Unlocked from inside” > Event Mode: Opened > Notify Users: “Scott”
Adding to your burden, you’d have to create FOUR such Scenes to cover each lock… (1) Watches for unlocked from inside, (2) locked from inside, (3) unlocked from outside (using Event Type: “A PIN code is entered”), and finally (4) locked from outside!!
5b. It gets worse: The “A PIN code is entered” type of event must be told “Which user code?” and, unless I’m gravely mistaken, cannot react to any and all codes.
I’ve mentioned the current SNAFU of not finding my devices’ “Events” (activity) listed at FindVera.com, and see you’re experiencing the same dilemma.
I suggest you strongly urge MCV to fix that problem, as well as add the missing features you need, because they all are a matter of programming, not a limitation of the lock or Z-Wave, in my opinion.
Thanks for the reply… I feel good and bad now, good because I am reassured I am thinking correctly on these items, but bad because the system as it is is not going to work for me at this point without MCV making those changes. I must have complete audit trail capability to make everyone from staff to guests to contractors accountable for their codes to access my units.
I can’t be going in every week to change the codes on the doors and have to sit there setting up scenes and such and I don’t want to be swamped with needless emails that could just be stored in a log file somewhere and accessed on demand.
Anyone from MCV care to chime in on this topic and let me know if I can expect these capabilities in the near future?
Thanks!
[quote=“LibraSun, post:2, topic:164883”]Great questions, Scott, and I’ll do my best to keep my observations brief:
MCV, brilliant as they are, has a nomenclature problem. You will find the term “Events” is used to descibe (a) device activity, (b) notifications listed on FindVera, or (c) something that triggers a Scene. The correct use of “Events” is (c).
The “Events” and “Luup Events” listed at FindVera should technically be called “Logs” (because that’s what Vera calls these items), or at the very least “Activity” (so normal people understand what they’re seeing).
“Notifications” and “Luup Notifications” currently don’t bring you to the same place on FindVera.com – the former mysteriously leads to a list of “Events”, while the latter correctly leads to a list of Notifications (email and/or SMS) sent by Vera.
Although Vera knows the difference between a Schlage LiNK lock being locked/unlocked from the inside or outside, this distinction is not currently indicated among the “Events” you see at FindVera.com. The only way to distinguish inside from outside is to set up Scenes - as you surmised above - and have the Scenes (named, for example, “Door Locked from Inside”) send Notifications to you, which is a clumsy and ugly work-around.
EXAMPLE:
Scene 1: “Unlocked from Inside” > Device: Schlage Lock > Event Type: “A door is opened or closed” > Event Name: “Unlocked from inside” > Event Mode: Opened > Notify Users: “Scott”
Adding to your burden, you’d have to create FOUR such Scenes to cover each lock… (1) Watches for unlocked from inside, (2) locked from inside, (3) unlocked from outside (using Event Type: “A PIN code is entered”), and finally (4) locked from outside!!
5b. It gets worse: The “A PIN code is entered” type of event must be told “Which user code?” and, unless I’m gravely mistaken, cannot react to any and all codes.
I’ve mentioned the current SNAFU of not finding my devices’ “Events” (activity) listed at FindVera.com, and see you’re experiencing the same dilemma.
I suggest you strongly urge MCV to fix that problem, as well as add the missing features you need, because they all are a matter of programming, not a limitation of the lock or Z-Wave, in my opinion.[/quote]
Further thoughts while you’re waiting on MCV (don’t expect much while CEDIA is going on):
How do other people in your line of work handle this monumental challenge?
You might very well get by with a “Notifications for everything” arrangement, if you direct all the email to a Google GMail account, which can warehouse oodles of info. This nicely dovetails with the storage on FindVera, and (if you’re unfamiliar with Google…) has the added bonus of being able to “filter” specific emails for content like “Lock Opened by Janitor” which could then be forwarded to your regular email account.
I have thought about that as a last resort, but I think it is more of a band-aid than a fix. In the old days you would go to a lock and hook it up to a computer or handheld and pull the audit trail from the lock as well as reprogram them.
I also thought of something else I would like to see, right now I have a door that has been unlocked for about 3-4 hours (Since I was there over the weekend messing with the locks when the guests checked in I know they are elderly in that unit). Is there a way to get a notification if a door has been unlocked for a certain amount of time?
Thanks again for the help!
[quote=“LibraSun, post:4, topic:164883”]Further thoughts while you’re waiting on MCV (don’t expect much while CEDIA is going on):
How do other people in your line of work handle this monumental challenge?
You might very well get by with a “Notifications for everything” arrangement, if you direct all the email to a Google GMail account, which can warehouse oodles of info. This nicely dovetails with the storage on FindVera, and (if you’re unfamiliar with Google…) has the added bonus of being able to “filter” specific emails for content like “Lock Opened by Janitor” which could then be forwarded to your regular email account.
Stuff to think about. Good luck with this!![/quote]
I would love to be able to select a single PIN or several, or all, to trigger Scenes and Notifications. Creating separate Scenes for each Event, or each user on a lock seems more complicated that it should be. I guess I should post a suggestion in the UI section.
I just have a single lock, so I’m not facing the complications scotthay is, but simplification of the UI is in the best interest of all us. I will go so far as to say that the success or failure of MCV rests entirely on its UI design. Obviously, Vera has to DO lots of things, and the complications are enormous, but all the heavy lifting has to happen in the background. The setup and operation must be dead simple, and as an end user, I don’t even want to know how much is going on in the background.
Good point about the need to fix the naming. It is confusing. We’ll work on it. We should rename events to “Triggers” when you attach them to a scene. But Vera does actually log every ‘event’ from all the devices, down to a light switch being turned on and off. We used to display all these events in the findvera portal and it overwhelmed people with way too much data. So we applied filters and now only ‘important’ events are shown, and the others are hidden. A door being opened/closed, and a pin code entered, or a failed pin code, are ‘important’, and all of them are logged in the database and stored for 1 year. This is regardless of whether or not they are used in a ‘trigger’ (ie event attached to a scene). If you want to get an sms/email when one of those events occurs, then you do need to add it to a scene and check the user box for notifications.
I see that now, have you noticed how the “door lock opened” “door lock closed” is being reported backwards (says opened when locked and closed when unlocked). Also, when a pin code is entered it doesn’t say anything but a time stamp.
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