First of all, I’m new to Z-Wave but, I’ve got a VeraLite and a number of devices and pretty much all of it is running as I’d hoped. I’ve got some issues with the Everspring ST814 temperature and humidity device and I’m not sure if it’s my lack of knowledge that’s the issue or it simply isn’t behaving as expected.
My Everspring ST814 is associated with a Fibaro FGS221 and controls that fine though. The ceiling fan in the bathroom comes on at >75% humidity and then goes off at <70% humidity.
In the ‘device options’ section I’ve set Var 7 to 1, so that is should report temperature changes of 1 degree and Var 8 to 5, so it should report back humidity changes of 5% to Vera. The dashboard does not seem to reflect this though but I’ve read about issues here.
I’ve set a scene called ‘Fan On’ that matches the ST814 programmed settings and is triggered when the humidity > 75%. When polling is enabled on my Z-Wave network this seems to work OK but, with polling switched off the scene does not run at all. I don’t understand why it makes a difference if the ST814 is reporting changes.
Similarly, I’ve got a scene called ‘Fan Off’ that matches the ST814 programmed settings and is triggered when the humidty < 70%. With Z-Wave polling enabled, this scene seems to run at regular intervals (10-15 mins) if the temperature is below 70%. Is the wording wrong when setting the trigger and should ‘drops below’ really be ‘is below’?
I’m only really using the scenes to log the fan coming on and off, out of curiosity but I can’t get this bit to work reliably or predicatably. The scenes do nothing other than send a socket layer message to my main home control system process.
My project is documented here:
When I call I have code like this in my scene Luup tab, is this causing the ST814 to be polled or is it just getting a cached value from the Vera Lite?
local sensor = luup.variable_get(“urn:upnp-org:serviceId:TemperatureSensor1”,“CurrentTemperature”, 5)
If it is being polled, do I need to set the ST814 wakeup to match? How do the wakeups and polls get to be synchronised?
Rob
That data is being called from vera. Vera will give you the value that it currently has. You may want to leave the polling to the defaults or to have it set at a higher value to not drain the batteries. I do not know how the ST814 updates it’s data, if it does it very so x minutes or when a value changes. I know the HSM-100 will update at so many x minutes or when the device wakes up due to a motion event. My hsm-100 is set to wake up every 1800 seconds. Most battery devices work in a way that they wake only when a change happens on the device or at a set time frame. Is there a reason why you turned off polling?
My 25+ years of real-time systems design tell me that polling is not a desirable thing to do. It is better to have event driven systems and there is no real reason why you would need polling in a Z-Wave network, if all the devices can report status as events back to the Z-wave controller or associated devices.
We have configured the Everyspring ST814 temperature and humidity module to report status (events). The Everspring AN157 appliance modules also report status changes back tp the Z-Wave controller. All of our other devices also report back events too. I can see no requirement for polling on our Z-Wave network, so I wanted to turn it off. Someone tell me please if I have mis-understood how it works.
The only place where I use polling in our whole hybrid HCS is the on the 1-Wire network part, which has a process to poll the DS1920 temperature sensors. This process detects changes and sends them as events in to our HCS. This is a design feature of Dallas 1-Wire networks, so I have no choice but to do it this way.
Rob
There is no harm in having Vera poll the devices. You will get better results that way. Sadly not every zwave device works the way it should. It is hit or miss for a device to notify vera of it’s status. Lutron has a patent on reporting back of it’s status for home automation devices. This caused many manufactures removing this feature. Good examples are when a light switch is turned on by the switch itself, it may not report back to Vera and you will not get the correct status. This is were the polling comes in. The only harm in polling, is for battery devices and that is if you have the polling set at a more frequent time.
this is not a scientific test by any means but my empiric observations with multiple systems over time lead me to to believe that polling of my battery devices not only offers no performance improvement but may well increase Vera’s workload to her detriment (missed calls). My best performance has been with a 0 polling frequency.