Unfortunately that part of the log hasn’t got any information that is useful to me. Even the first line of it will only happen after some other error, probably the true cause. The symptoms are indicative of an intermittent serial connection dropout. These are buggers to pinpoint, unfortunately.
Catch the log right from the Luup restart and I might be able to point to something less vague.
[quote=“futzle, post:41, topic:182482”]Unfortunately that part of the log hasn’t got any information that is useful to me. Even the first line of it will only happen after some other error, probably the true cause. The symptoms are indicative of an intermittent serial connection dropout. These are buggers to pinpoint, unfortunately.
Catch the log right from the Luup restart and I might be able to point to something less vague.[/quote]
Futzle, thanks for the reply and sorry for the incomplete log. I hopped in after the issue already started and didn’t catch the beginning, then assumed you might just recognize the issue. Just knowing that it’s a possible issue with the actual serial connection is a big help. If it happens again I’ll be sure to just reboot and grab the whole event.
Perhaps someone can suggest an easy solution to a scene I am trying to create. My zone 3 motion sensor is somewhat sensitive and even though it’s mounted at 9 feet the cat is still able to trip it fairly easily. I want to bypass zone 3 each time the alarm is armed, however I discovered this is best done while disarmed. I should have just read the book:
BYPASSING ZONES
If you wish to bypass one or more zones, this must be done while the
system is in the disarmed state.
Maybe someone has a suggestion on how to accomplish the bypass? The Vera does successfully bypass the zone when commanded while disarmed.
The manual does state that pressing “Bypass” when armed will disarm interior zones. However I don’t see a “bypass” command in the device actions for the plugin. I am pretty sure my keypads are 1448e models. Here’s a clip from the book:
CHANGING MODES WHILE SYSTEM IS ARMED
Pressing the [STAY] key will turn on/off (toggle) a delay on entry/exit
doors and turn on/off (toggle) the instant icon.
(Optional) Press the [BYPASS] key at this time to turn on/off (toggle)
all designated interior zones.
Futzle, I upgraded my Vera from Vera 3 to Vera Edge. The Version of the plugin is 81 that ti dowloaded.
Before the Serial Port worked fine with the RS232 USB Adapter on my Vera 3 and app works perfectly.
When I plug in the same exact cable to the Vera Edge, the Serial Port selection dropdown stays stuck on “NONE” and does not allow me to choose the FTDSIO Adapter on the drop down menu so I can configure the rest of the parameters for connecting.
I have tried to plug/unplug and reset the unit but no ability to connect the vera edge to the USB port as before on the Vera 3…
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Futzle, I just spoke with Vera Support today Re the USB Direct Serial port connection issue, they reported they were aware that the Edge did have an issue with USB connectivity and would be publishing a firmware update to resolve this sometime this month. Unless you have another solution or workaround I can wait to see if this resolves and I can get my GE Security system back working again same as the Vera 3 
[quote=“YzRacer, post:38, topic:182482”][quote=“futzle, post:37, topic:182482”]Thanks for confirming that the change works for you. I’ll include it in version 82 so you won’t need to patch the file manually again.
I’m afraid that I’ve got no suggestions about the remote arming away/stay conundrum. My NX-4 hasn’t been configured that way so it’s always Worked For Me. I guess you could just try it and see. (To be honest, I didn’t know that the Caddx alarm suffered from this “feature”; there’s a great deal of discussion on the DSC alarm forums about a very similar behaviour, which I thought was limited to that system. So I learned something.)
The whole House Modes fiasco in UI7, where you have to specify Arm or Bypass for every sensor without the option to leave its state unchanged, is why I’m now recommending you go back to your NX-584 or NX-8E and disable the Toggle Zone Bypass message in the interface. You lose the ability to bypass a zone from Vera, but you don’t run the risk of a house mode change disabling your entire security system.[/quote]
Thanks for such a quick fix! I have been reading the NX8 manual and if I just disable the auto bypass I think it will kill the remote arming issue. It’s not even that big of a deal if it goes into stay mode as long as it gets disarmed from the app instead of opening the door. I’m really just happy to see a detailedarmmode so I can use the system to trigger scenes.
I don’t mind the toggle zone bypass, as I am always deployed and I prefer to have the capability to make changes remotely. From my little bit of testing yesterday it appears that a house mode change won’t disable anything, as I can only get the Caddx to bypass a sensor when I toggle it individually in Vera. Since I am always away I am would even consider entering the program mode from your plugin if that is possible. Getting my girlfriend to make changes at the keypad is not my preference.[/quote]
Futzle, thanks again for all of your help with UI7. I have been busy reading the forum and learning all about the Vera and I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge in the last couple of months. I want to clarify a couple of things I mentioned:
My system will arm remotely without a door being opened/closed for a proper “exit”. I have successfully done that several times when my girlfriend left without arming.
A motion sensor can be bypassed with the Vera. It doesn’t work well with mode changes unless your patterns are very specific since there are a lot of variables involved. I am currently using PLEG, with a condition that will bypass my interior problem zone whenever the system is “Ready” for > 1 minute. As I mentioned before attempting to bypass a zone when in exit delay or armed mode can cause issues, so it’s best to avoid that situation.
Your fix for the continuous ExitDelay indication on the UI7 dashboard is holding up well, however I have noticed some issues with PLEG:
Using triggers to monitor detailed arm mode status doesn’t always work. For some reason PLEG doesn’t see triggers as true when they are in fact true or it may see triggers as true when they are false. I suspect this may have something to do with the fix you implemented but I am not certain. I have had better luck using device properties with PLEG and monitoring the detailed arm mode with conditions of eq “ExitDelay” and such. This always works well for Armed and Ready modes, however today I noticed it missed “ExitDelay” twice. I’m not 100% certain that isn’t an issue with the order of my PLEG conditions but I would think it should identify true when the state changes and is true. I’ve attached my PLEG status report for your review if you are interested. It clearly shows some discrepancy between the triggers and the device properties.
Futzle, I had an interesting scenario occur the other day with the plugin. I haven’t been able to determine the cause and it seems the log and the UI7 gui did not match what was actually happening. My girlfriend reported a fail to set stay mode from the Authomation app when she went to bed on the night of the 26th. She didn’t report this to me until the afternoon of the 27th, and when I checked the Vera web gui everything appeared to be normal, however I also could not set stay mode from the app and received no error on transmitting the message. I checked in on the luup log and saw the dreaded “Ignoring byte” message repeating over and over, however it was odd that the Vera web gui did not indicate “18 sensors are no longer connected” as I usually see with a comms failure. There were a few attempts to set stay and then I initiated a reboot via ssh and all was well.
I have attached a log for your review. I filtered it down a lot, but I want to note that the log starts at 0700 and there are no messages for device 18 (Caddx Plugin) until 1500. It appears there was 0 communication with the Caddx for several hours until I attempted to set stay mode. I am just looking for some input on whether this might be an issue with my USB to serial adapter or an issue with UI7. If it’s the adapter I will swap it out, and if it’s some other issue I would like to create some type of PLEG event that will reboot the Vera when this occurs.
I’m using this adapter:
Premium High Speed USB 2.0 to Serial RS-232 DB-9 Converter - Supports Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, 98, Linux and Mac / USB TO SERIAL ADAPTER (USB2-VE487) with FTDI Chipset
This kind of thing isn’t unheard of. I get it too, a couple of times a year. It’s unfortunately near impossible to pinpoint a culprit. As you’ve observed, a Luup restart, or a reset of the USB port with a power cycle, and it all comes good.
My gut feeling is that it is either the USB controller inside the host (Vera in your case, or my PC running ser2net in my case) or the USB adapter itself that is misbehaving. USB is unsuited to long periods of continuous uptime because it doesn’t have any way of renegotiating connections if the state machine inside the controller gets out of whack. That’s one reason why you continue to find RS-232 and RS-485 connections in equipment: it’s so simple that it’s hard to break.
I can test my hypothesis now: I’ve swapped out my PC running ser2net for a WIZNet Ethernet-to-serial gateway. No USB in sight. If I’m right, this will be exactly as reliable as Vera itself and have no other modes of failure.
The reason why the sensors don’t report that they are disconnected in the Vera UI is because the plugin doesn’t poll them. If the serial line goes quiet then the plugin just assumes that no one is moving to trigger sensors. This is partly because I never implemented polling, and partly because I doubt Vera’s ability to poll reliably: plugins are single-threaded, so making it sleep-and-poll once an hour could interfere with actual use and mess with incoming asynchronous events.
I can test my hypothesis now: I've swapped out my PC running ser2net for a WIZNet Ethernet-to-serial gateway. No USB in sight. If I'm right, this will be exactly as reliable as Vera itself and have no other modes of failure.
This soudns interesting, may caddx-interface also does not work from time to time so of this wiznet gateway can solve that I will get me one. I assume you have it working with the caddx, any pointer on how to set it up?
Regards, Hans
[quote=“futzle, post:47, topic:182482”]This kind of thing isn’t unheard of. I get it too, a couple of times a year. It’s unfortunately near impossible to pinpoint a culprit. As you’ve observed, a Luup restart, or a reset of the USB port with a power cycle, and it all comes good.
My gut feeling is that it is either the USB controller inside the host (Vera in your case, or my PC running ser2net in my case) or the USB adapter itself that is misbehaving. USB is unsuited to long periods of continuous uptime because it doesn’t have any way of renegotiating connections if the state machine inside the controller gets out of whack. That’s one reason why you continue to find RS-232 and RS-485 connections in equipment: it’s so simple that it’s hard to break.
I can test my hypothesis now: I’ve swapped out my PC running ser2net for a WIZNet Ethernet-to-serial gateway. No USB in sight. If I’m right, this will be exactly as reliable as Vera itself and have no other modes of failure.
The reason why the sensors don’t report that they are disconnected in the Vera UI is because the plugin doesn’t poll them. If the serial line goes quiet then the plugin just assumes that no one is moving to trigger sensors. This is partly because I never implemented polling, and partly because I doubt Vera’s ability to poll reliably: plugins are single-threaded, so making it sleep-and-poll once an hour could interfere with actual use and mess with incoming asynchronous events.[/quote]
Futlze, as always, thanks for your input! This is the first time it’s happened to me without alerting on the Vera home screen. I attribute this to increased stability as my Vera doesn’t reboot nearly as often as it did before I became familiar with the system. In the cases where I saw 18 devices no longer connected the Vera likely had a luup restart that did not resolve the serial issue. I found I could change the serial configuration and then put it back with a luup reload and it would be good, or I could reboot.
It doesn’t happen often, but I would like to implement something that reboots the Vera automatically if this happens again. If it doesn’t poll and the line goes silent then how would you suggest I monitor for the condition? As we just saw it may be a very long time until a luup restart and PLEG isn’t going to act on a status that hasn’t changed. Perhaps a luup variable get command on a schedule with PLEG and maybe a bad return on the request could trigger a reboot? I’ll play around with that idea and see what I come up with.
I just upgraded to UI7 and have the plug-in working fine. I’m in the process of adding all of my zones manually, but there is no quick way to do it under UI7. I thought in past versions (it’s been a while), I was able to add more than one sensor at a time manually, but after I click add, there are no additional boxes. It also tells me to “save”, but under UI7, I don’t think it has the same functionality, as things save automatically.
Also, once I add a zone, how long would it typically take for the sensor to appear, and how would I get it to “reload” under UI7?
Thank you so much for this plug-in, the Vera has successfully replaced my aging Stargate and this plug-in was key for my setup!
It was a tedious process for me to add my zones in UI7 as well. I found it’s best to take your time and use F5 or CTL+F5 to reload your browser often. You can also go to the advanced tab of any device and scroll to the bottom to reload the Luup engine. It has been pretty reliable now that I have everything set.
Thanks for the response! I just added them all successfully, and ended up rebooting after each, as I was showing duplicate names under the zones prior to reloading. I should have just reloaded the Luup engine - Getting used to UI7.
There’s probably no clean way to do this with the plugin in its current version (81). Ideally the top-level device would have a “poll” action in its service list which would send an unsolicited packet to the alarm panel (say, a Get Configuration request). Then, when the panel responds, a timestamp is updated on the device to reflect a successful round trip of communication. This probably isn’t too difficult to implement, so I’ll add it to the pile of things to do.
A not-very-clean way with the current version would be to invoke a luup.call_action with some existing action that doesn’t have a side-effect, say, urn:futzle-com:serviceId:CaddxNX584Security1/LogEventScan. This starts a job which ideally should succeed or fail based on your serial connection being up or down. You don’t actually care about the log entries, just the fact that the request succeeded. I’m not sure if or how you’d invoke that regularly from PLEG, so you’ve got some homework too.
I have the Caddx Plugin running on UI7, updated to the latest version which seems to be 0.81 and when opening the connection tab I get:
Error executing function serialConnection(): jsonp.get_lu_device_variable_value is not a function
Any idea?
Hans
[quote=“HansW, post:54, topic:182482”]I have the Caddx Plugin running on UI7, updated to the latest version which seems to be 0.81 and when opening the connection tab I get:
Error executing function serialConnection(): jsonp.get_lu_device_variable_value is not a function
Any idea?
Hans[/quote]
Have you checked that the serial connection is re set back up? Apps, Develop apps, serial port configuration, the bottom drop down “used by device” and select your Cadx panel?
I’m running 81.0 on two different vera edges using the latest UI7.
The “Connect” tab does not and cannot work in UI7. You must use Vera’s own serial connection interface to set up the serial port.
The “Connect” tab does not and cannot work in UI7. You must use Vera’s own serial connection interface to set up the serial port.[/quote]
Ahhh yes this is correct!
I must be overlooking something very obvious since I have checked out the forum and internet on setting up this wiznet interface to replace my USB cable but cannot get it to work.
The wiznet is configured with the correct baudrate, start and stopbits, a fixed ip address, port 5000 and server mode with server ip set to 0.0.0.0 and port 0.
In the caddx advanced tab I have set the wiznet ip address:5000 but setup fails.
Where can I go from here anyone??
Hans
I did not configure the serial port using the Serial Port configuration. I simply put the IP address into the Advanced tab on the Caddx device. Again I have no configuration for serial port under the Apps tab.
Thanks, I tried that also but without luck…
Hans
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