UI7 triggers siren by itself?

I quite recently replaced my old and trusty, stable Vera/UI5 with a Vera Edge/UI7. Is has been more than a bumpy road… >:(

One issue I still have is that the damn thing keeps firing off my siren.

Thing is, my alarm system disarms with the unlocking of the main door. This triggers a scene that disarms all sensors. I had an issue on UI5 that if I was to quick opening the door, Vera hadn’t gotten around to disarm the door sensor yet. We are talking sub-second time. So I just wrote a small delay in the code and re-checked alarm panel state before triggering siren, problem solved.

Not so on UI7. It just didn’t work, and I had no clue why.

Believe I found out today. Adding a new motion sensor, not part of any scene or code. Arming it and triggering it will immediately fire siren! So it has to be built in “logic” in UI7; “Any triggering of armed sensors will fire sirens, nothing you can do about it!” Guys, really?

Tell me it’s a bug, and not a “feature”, please? I need to be in charge of my sirens, not Vera, ok? Nice feature, if you can configure it, turn it off, give it some smartness. Without, it is just plain stupid home control. You need to fix it. Thanks.

So instead of disarming the sensor you want away to have an armed sensor not set off a siren?

If your alarm panel/sensors are armed and you open the door wont an alarm go off?

Sounds like you need to disarm the sensors or system before tou open the door.

Also do you know about house modes in ui7? Probley need a little more research. Ui7 has added extra features then ui5 and i think they are throwing you off since you haven’t set them up or atleast disabled them since your trying to setup ui7 like ui5.

[quote=“integlikewhoa, post:2, topic:189894”]So instead of disarming the sensor you want away to have an armed sensor not set off a siren?

If your alarm panel/sensors are armed and you open the door wont an alarm go off?

Sounds like you need to disarm the sensors or system before tou open the door.[/quote]

I want to be in charge of when the siren goes off. I will determine if I leave it up to Vera to decide, or not.
I described the scenario, dind’t I?
I have a script that triggers the siren based on what I need. It will also make sure that the siren is not triggered when it should’t. That’s called a smart house. Vera UI7 just made it less smart, since siren is now triggered when it should’t. You did read what I wrote about delay, didn’t you?

Thank you for your input!
I haven’t cared about house modes yet, as I have own scenes and code that does what they do, and as far as I can tell, in a much smarter way. How do you believe house modes could fix this issue?

If you don’t disable both you cant run your own script.

I have no idea what you mean by “disable both”, could you please elaborate?
And for your information; I am running my own scripts just fine all the time.

Disarm your sensors all the time or when your home would prevent the siren from going off.

I have no idea what you mean by “disable both”, could you please elaborate?
And for your information; I am running my own scripts just fine all the time.[/quote]

Disarm your sensors all the time or when your home would prevent the siren from going off.

I have no idea what you mean by “disable both”, could you please elaborate?
And for your information; I am running my own scripts just fine all the time.[/quote][/quote]

You are not making any sense at all, so I have no idea why you keep on posting. Why can’t you read what my problem is before you suggest something that never can be a solution? I need to use the “armed/unarmed” logic for my alarm system, and I can’t use modes since they don’t do what I need them to do.

I found the solution, it was a bug in UI7 as I expected.

Since I don’t use modes for anything, I leave the system in “Home” mode at all time. There is no way to “disable” modes.
For “Home” mode, everything is disabled. That includes the default setting that says “fire siren and start recording” whenever an armed sensor is tripped. This was disabled for “Home” mode. But Vera still fired siren and started recording if an armed sensor was tripped. Yes, system was in “Home” mode when this happened.

I then disabled everything for the other modes that I never, ever used as well.
That did the trick; Vera no longer fires siren. System has been in “Home” mode all the time, so this was clearly another bug in UI7.

So are you saying even if the sesnor is disarmed it still sets of the siren in home mode?

Do tou just leave your sensors armed 24 hours of the day even as your home opening and closing doors?

The logic your uaing should disarm sensor when home and arm them when you leave.

[quote=“integlikewhoa, post:10, topic:189894”]So are you saying even if the sesnor is disarmed it still sets of the siren in home mode?

Do tou just leave your sensors armed 24 hours of the day even as your home opening and closing doors?

The logic your uaing should disarm sensor when home and arm them when you leave.[/quote]

Please read my initial post, and ask if there is anything you don’t understand, ok?
Exactly what is it that you don’t understand in “This triggers a scene that disarms all sensors”?

[quote=“Thorden, post:11, topic:189894”][quote=“integlikewhoa, post:10, topic:189894”]So are you saying even if the sesnor is disarmed it still sets of the siren in home mode?

Do tou just leave your sensors armed 24 hours of the day even as your home opening and closing doors?

The logic your uaing should disarm sensor when home and arm them when you leave.[/quote]

Please read my initial post, and ask if there is anything you don’t understand, ok?
Exactly what is it that you don’t understand in “This triggers a scene that disarms all sensors”?[/quote]

The guy is trying to help you here. No need to get so antsy.

I am confused myself with what you are trying to do. Indeed if you are coming from manually setting up your vera as an alarm system (That’s what I was doing on UI5) and going into UI7, you may be confused by some of the setups. I very quickly learned how much more convenient smart home modes are.

Now for your specific problem, you say you run a scene to disarm your sensors yet you complain that once the sensors are armed and triggered, it sets your alarm off. Well that’s what it is designed to do unless you change the behavior of your siren under in the house mode screen. There is a section when you scroll down called “What to do if an armed sensor trips?” with each of your siren under it. By default, I think it turns on the siren under every mode. If you never switch house mode and are always in home mode, you can just turn your siren off there and just control them through your scenes.
Also we are not sure whether you are saying your siren is going off while your sensor is armed or not so I don’t know if this helps you. If your sensors are disarmed and you are still setting off your siren, you probably have some issues in your scenes.

[quote=“anhman, post:12, topic:189894”][quote=“Thorden, post:11, topic:189894”][quote=“integlikewhoa, post:10, topic:189894”]So are you saying even if the sesnor is disarmed it still sets of the siren in home mode?

Do tou just leave your sensors armed 24 hours of the day even as your home opening and closing doors?

The logic your uaing should disarm sensor when home and arm them when you leave.[/quote]

Please read my initial post, and ask if there is anything you don’t understand, ok?
Exactly what is it that you don’t understand in “This triggers a scene that disarms all sensors”?[/quote]

The guy is trying to help you here. No need to get so antsy.

I am confused myself with what you are trying to do. Indeed if you are coming from manually setting up your vera as an alarm system (That’s what I was doing on UI5) and going into UI7, you may be confused by some of the setups. I very quickly learned how much more convenient smart home modes are.

Now for your specific problem, you say you run a scene to disarm your sensors yet you complain that once the sensors are armed and triggered, it sets your alarm off. Well that’s what it is designed to do unless you change the behavior of your siren under in the house mode screen. There is a section when you scroll down called “What to do if an armed sensor trips?” with each of your siren under it. By default, I think it turns on the siren under every mode. If you never switch house mode and are always in home mode, you can just turn your siren off there and just control them through your scenes.
Also we are not sure whether you are saying your siren is going off while your sensor is armed or not so I don’t know if this helps you. If your sensors are disarmed and you are still setting off your siren, you probably have some issues in your scenes.[/quote]

I appreciate people who try to help. But answering something that has nothing to do with the question, without even reading or understanding the question is not help, it is creating noise. It is what makes these forums worse, not better. It creates a lot of off-topic posts that doesn’t help anyone that might have the exact same problem, they just have to read a bunch of crap that doesn’t answer the question. Please stop doing that.

I am trying to describe the problem very accurately in my initial post, yet people keep asking the same over and over.
One important point is that Vera should do absolutely NOTHING if an armed sensor is tripped, unless you tell Vera to do it. There are many things you might want to do when an armed sensor is tripped, but Vera defaults to firing off your sirens and starting recording with your cameras, if you don’t actively turn these options off. It should be the other way around, these are things you could turn on, if you want them. But default has to be off.

But all that is besides the point here, since I already wrote a couple of posts further up that I indeed turned these settings off like you suggest, and Vera still fired the bloody siren!

I also wrote that I found the bug. I had to turn the “What to do if an armed sensor trips?” to OFF for all modes, not only “Home” mode. Then it started to work like intended, which is to do NOTHING when an armed sensor trips, until I define what it should do. You see the point? I had it turned off for “Home” mode, Vera was in “Home” mode, Vera STILL fired the siren when an armed sensor tripped. I really hope you agree that this is a problem and a bug?
Trying to tell me that it should be this way for armed sensors like the other guy did is just plain ridiculous. There is an ocean of difference between “should” and “could”, and this is obviously a case where the latter is the only one that make sense.

Now let me once more try to explain why this was an issue, so please pay attention.
The locking and unlocking of my front door (with key, keypad, app or whatever), is an event in Vera. It triggers scenes. These scenes arm/disarm my DSC alarm system, and they arm/disarm sensors. And more, much more. Sensors will be armed one by one as they get untripped, to make sure any tripped sensor won’t get armed and cause an alarm. Will “Away” mode do this? A fixed Delay won’t do it, as I am sure you understand.

When unlocking the front door (sensors are obviously in armed state when this happens) another scene is triggered, that disarms sensors, including the main door sensor. But since Vera is a slow bitch, it can take a little while for her to do all this stuff. (I swear VeraEdge is even slower than VeraLight with UI5.)
So it could take as much as a second for her to get the finger out and disarm the damned front door sensor. And if I or anyone else open the front door a little bit to quick, the stupid thing fires the siren, since an armed sensor she was already told to disarm but hadn’t gotten around to it yet was tripped. Smart Home? Not exactly…
The fix for this in was easy, I just wrote a small LUA function that waited a while, then rechecked the armed state before firing off all the alarm code that does a lot of cool stuff. Problem solved. Until VeraEdge/UI7 started firing off sirens all by itself, even after explicitly being instructed not to do so.

Is the problem clearer now? Do you see any way UI7 modes can do what I want to achieve?
I doubt it, but even if it could I don’t trust it. As you can see, I have no reason to do so either, the thing is still full of bugs. I just found one more in the “modes” section, as I am sure you can agree on. I will report it to Vera.

[quote=“Thorden, post:13, topic:189894”]I am trying to describe the problem very accurately in my initial post, yet people keep asking the same over and over.
One important point is that Vera should do absolutely NOTHING if an armed sensor is tripped, unless you tell Vera to do it. There are many things you might want to do when an armed sensor is tripped, but Vera defaults to firing off your sirens and starting recording with your cameras, if you don’t actively turn these options off. It should be the other way around, these are things you could turn on, if you want them. But default has to be off.

But all that is besides the point here, since I already wrote a couple of posts further up that I indeed turned these settings off like you suggest, and Vera still fired the bloody siren!

I also wrote that I found the bug. I had to turn the “What to do if an armed sensor trips?” to OFF for all modes, not only “Home” mode. Then it started to work like intended, which is to do NOTHING when an armed sensor trips, until I define what it should do. You see the point? I had it turned off for “Home” mode, Vera was in “Home” mode, Vera STILL fired the siren when an armed sensor tripped. I really hope you agree that this is a problem and a bug?[/quote]

Now I understand but not to beat on a dead horse, your original post was not very clear. I use this extensively and it works perfectly fine and have been doing it since the 7.0.4 version of firmware. It is definitely not supposed to turn on the siren in the given house mode. I tested it both ways and in all 4 house modes. I don’t think there is a bug. Is it possible that you were somehow not in the “home” mode?
Do you have geolocation turned on or something of that sort which would have changed your house mode without your knowledge?

Now let me once more try to explain why this was an issue, so please pay attention. The locking and unlocking of my front door (with key, keypad, app or whatever), is an event in Vera. It triggers scenes. These scenes arm/disarm my DSC alarm system, and they arm/disarm sensors. And more, much more. Sensors will be armed one by one as they get untripped, to make sure any tripped sensor won't get armed and cause an alarm. Will "Away" mode do this? A fixed Delay won't do it, as I am sure you understand.

There is indeed a limitation for what the house mode change triggers as I have posted in another thread even if you use the mcv “house mode” plugin. But if you do not care what the previous mode was before you switch to the new mode, you can trigger any scene you want on top of flipping switches and arming/disarming sensors by using the house mode plugin. I have dealt with the same problem you are referring to as well with motion sensors not being untripped before I arm them. The fixed delay actually did fix it and… as I found out recently, it seems like the siren does not even go off if the sensor was tripped before it was armed anymore so this particular problem seems to be gone. House modes have reduced the number of my scenes and made them a lot simpler.

When unlocking the front door (sensors are obviously in armed state when this happens) another scene is triggered, that disarms sensors, including the main door sensor. But since Vera is a slow bitch, it can take a little while for her to do all this stuff. (I swear VeraEdge is even slower than VeraLight with UI5.) So it could take as much as a second for her to get the finger out and disarm the damned front door sensor. And if I or anyone else open the front door a little bit to quick, the stupid thing fires the siren, since an armed sensor she was already told to disarm but hadn't gotten around to it yet was tripped. Smart Home? Not exactly... The fix for this in was easy, I just wrote a small LUA function that waited a while, then rechecked the armed state before firing off all the alarm code that does a lot of cool stuff. Problem solved. Until VeraEdge/UI7 started firing off sirens all by itself, even after explicitly being instructed not to do so.

This is rather strange that it takes time to disarm sensor since it is not a Z-wave state but the armed variable is purely internal to the vera and should be “instantaneous”. It is at least my experience using house modes but I may not require <1s reaction. I am guessing that you are unlocking your door with a key at that the signal needs to go from your lock to the vera? When I unlock from the vera, all my sensors get disarmed before the lock has even time to unlock itself since in this case a signal needs to come from the vera to the lock.

[quote=“anhman, post:14, topic:189894”]Now I understand but not to beat on a dead horse, your original post was not very clear. I use this extensively and it works perfectly fine and have been doing it since the 7.0.4 version of firmware. It is definitely not supposed to turn on the siren in the given house mode. I tested it both ways and in all 4 house modes. I don’t think there is a bug. Is it possible that you were somehow not in the “home” mode?
Do you have geolocation turned on or something of that sort which would have changed your house mode without your knowledge?[/quote]

There most definately is something seriously screwed with the modes thing in my unit, that’s for sure!

I wanted to see if I could recreate the issue, even though it won’t be the exact same situation as everything in modes was untouched when this happened, except the “What to do if an armed sensor trips ?” for Home mode.

Now, when I try changing any of the settings in any of the modes, they are automatically reverted to default setting after a minute or so. Right before my eyes, they just reset, I am not touching anything! That probably explains why it kept setting off the siren even though I turned the setting off.
At least, that setting seems to stick now, others won’t…
Still wonder why I am not so enthusiastic about using modes?

Just noticed another issue with the GUI in modes too. The visible part of the device name on the left hand side is limited to 8-10 characters, so it is very hard to know which devices you are configuring. In fact impossible for some of them with similar first characters. That will be plenty, as I have over 100 devices in my system.
I can’t find any way to expand the name column, is there?
Considering all the unused space on the other side, this is unbelievable. See attached pic.

This is indeed a bug. I have a number of motion sensors (some control lights, some control camera’s, some control sirens). When upgrading to UI7, if any of my motion sensor sense movement and trigger, all of my sirens are also triggered absent any scene. This is a bug and as the user should control what happens with a MS device is triggered.

Did you try disabling all siren actions in the “What to do if an armed sensor trips?” for all modes?
You find it under “Dashboard”, “My Modes”. That did the trick for me, even though my system never, ever was in any other mode than “Home”. And siren actions was disabled for “Home” mode already.

Problem is that the settings under Configure My Preset Modes doesn’t seem to stick, so you might have to try several times.
I haven’t figured out why it reverts setting yet, but it might be browser specific. I initially used Google Chrome, but trying the same thing with MS Edge seems to work a lot better. The unit does become unresponsive and seems to reload when you change a lot of sensor states under modes even with MS Edge, and it will revert some settings, but mainly not. Give it a shot.

And make sure your sensors are not armed if you don’t need them to be.
My challenge was the delay between doorlock unlocking and Vera disarming door sensor, in other words delay between armed and disarmed mode. In this situation, opening of the door triggered an armed sensor that was in process of being disarmed. Not a normal situation.

I too am interested in forcing this device not to sound when there are sensors tripped. My reason for this is that I have multi-sensor 4s in each of the bedrooms in my home, the armed/disarmed switch acts as an override; for example, the multi sensor will only turn on the lights in that room, when armed and tripped, this way when I go to bed, I press a button that disarms the multi sensor, and no more lights turning on automatically until the next day…

After adding this device for the first time, just walking around my house set off the alarm constantly, quite aggravating even after I figured out why it was happening.

I have checked the section under dashboard that covers what to do if an armed sensor is tripped, and unfortunately that was not set to trigger any alarms already, so no luck there. I have submitted a ticket to customer support requesting that they disable this feature on my Vera.

[quote=“evane241, post:18, topic:189894”]I too am interested in forcing this device not to sound when there are sensors tripped. My reason for this is that I have multi-sensor 4s in each of the bedrooms in my home, the armed/disarmed switch acts as an override; for example, the multi sensor will only turn on the lights in that room, when armed and tripped, this way when I go to bed, I press a button that disarms the multi sensor, and no more lights turning on automatically until the next day…

After adding this device for the first time, just walking around my house set off the alarm constantly, quite aggravating even after I figured out why it was happening.

I have checked the section under dashboard that covers what to do if an armed sensor is tripped, and unfortunately that was not set to trigger any alarms already, so no luck there. I have submitted a ticket to customer support requesting that they disable this feature on my Vera.[/quote]
I would say you are probably using the “armed” flag of sensors in a way that is unintended by MiOS/Vera. I would rather suggest you use a virtual switch or some other flag mechanism to achieve what you are doing with your bedrooms lighting. This is what I am doing in my set-up

I personnaly like the “armed” logic (I hope @Thorden will not get incensed…) of the current system and the house modes as they are. they only miss the ability out of the box to fire scenes or deal with virtual switches, but the HouseModes plugin or some Lua code can address that.

I have nothing against the “armed” logic, it is very good. I use it a lot.
My problem was a bug, no question about that. It triggered the siren when a device was tripped, even if it was told not to. The only way I managed to get rid of it was to disable the logic in the modes section. So the bug is/was probably in that section. And I do not like the way modes are implemented in UI7. It is a good idea, but the implementation is not.

It might be that evane241 has the same issue as me, a bug that seems to fire sirens all by itself. And it might be that the use of armed state in this scenario is not exactly as intended, however I have never seen any official statement that would support this. Is it so that Vera really “reserves” that armed sensor flag for triggering of sirens?
To be able to use it like this, he will have to disable modes logic for triggering of siren, at least for the active mode, and pray it helps. It didn’t for me, I had to disable all of it for all modes. On top of that, it reverted back to enabled by itself time after time until it finally stuck.

I would also use a virtual switch and a simple LUA for this scenario. Like this: If sensor tripped, check switch state. If switch is on, turn light on. Return false. Press of the mentioned button toggles virtual switch state. Or something similar.