Good evening,
I seem to go through this issue ever year or so with battery powered devices. It seems that Vera isn’t accurately getting battery information from devices, and a device will report as 90% in the interface, when in reality it might be 37% or less. This issue has bitten me on more than one occasion, and I have to go through the process of moving Vera around my home, polling the devices, and reconfiguring them to get them to play nice again.
I have two main categories of battery powered devices. Blinds and motion sensors. I only have a few motion sensors, but I have blinds on every window in my home. Last week, my blinds were reporting 90%, but one of them was actually 5% and Vera lost contact. I went through the house, charged all the batteries, and as I previously mentioned, had to reassociate each device.
Is there a better way to get accurate battery levels? Perhaps a lua script that runs once a day, or once a week? Even if I have alerts set up to send a notification if the battery level is low, it’ll only function if Vera is getting accurate information.
I wonder how far they will take is as it seems the focus is now on the Ezlo product. I had posted something about NYCE sensors back in April and its been crickets. I did e-mail and they said they would send it up to engineering but I have my doubts as they have not released firmware for Vera in a very long time and there was a highly anticipated release but it has not come to fruition.
I folllowed up with them directly, giving them my serial, device ids, etc, and I’m waiting to hear back. I honestly don’t expect a new development release, but it might be something as changing a setting in the device configuration to update more often. Not sure, but if they’re able to help, I’m happy to continue to use Vera until something more useful comes along.
Despite what you’re saying about them putting all their effort into Ezlo, it seems their Ezlo development isn’t all that swift either. I’d love to say that I’m ready to take the plunge into Ezlo, but I just don’t think it’s where it needs to be. There are too many things I can do with Vera that Ezlo doesn’t feature. The main reason I’d want to switch to Ezlo is getting out of the cloud and having it hosted locally, but all I’ve read, it’s just not there yet, between something’s needed to be done on a mobile device, some through a web gui, and lack of geofencing feature (or equivalent, such is iPhoneLocator), I’m not ready to make the jump.
I am actually having the same problem with my Kwikset 916. It seems that when the batteries are brand new (when you expect to see 100%) Vera correctly reports back. However, once they drop by about 25% or more the accuracy drops off significantly. In many cases it won’t be until you see the red dead battery light on the lock that you’ll know there’s an issue.
Don’t know if that helps the issue or makes it more muddy but I thought it might be important to mention.