I have explored many routes for using a switch to trigger a scene that turns on a whole group of lights. I bought the GE switch before understanding the instant status update issue so it doesn’t work. Some of the forum postings suggest you can use the broadcast feature of the switch as long as it is directly connected to Vera but I couldn’t get the manual routes to work. So then I looked at the GE scene controller. It might work, but it is not a very ergonomic switch. This will be outside (not in elements) and folks would likely be wearing gloves so it won’t work. Plus there are a lot of buttons to confuse the family.
Then I started looking at the switches that do support instant status update. Oh boy are they expensive. The Leviton VRS15 is ~$80 plus I need a companion switch because I have a 3-way. I suppose it would work but I don’t like the 1 way rocker (always push bottom). I want a dual rocker so there is no confusion on whether you are turning things on or off. Lights in the scene could be out of sync. The Cooper has a dual rocker but it looks like the companion switch is just as much as main switch!!!
So now I’m looking at Leviton scene controllers. They look more robust than GE one, but are very expensive.
Are there any lower cost options? Maybe a special hack to fast poll the GE switch? The polling times through Vera are clearly not reliable. Or maybe a product that I’m not seeing through my countless searches?
So, a switch doesn’t have to support instant status to support starting a scene. I have for example, a set of lights in our living room (table lamps) that we almost always use together with a floor lamp across the room. For some reason, we just like that amount of light. So, I have the floor lamp come on whenever the table lamps are turned on (at night and before 23:00). This works every time.
And you can do some pretty interesting things with the GE switches. The issue gets to reliability of the action and the kludge nature of the trigger. People want to do a fast On-OFF-ON to control a 2nd action. You can do that. However, it is all about the time it takes your Vera to acknowledge the change in status. While you can get it to work, it usually doesn’t support the ‘spouse test.’ because… the light you use to trigger the scene has to be cycled. If you don’t want to disturb your family watching a movie in the family room, but you want to turn on that porch light that is just too far away, people are gonna get upset when you start blinking the lights…
So in your case, you rely on Vera polling the switch looking for a state change? I can’t get that to work very well at all. The polling time for the device has little impact on how long Vera takes to see state change. I’ve have changed it to 3 seconds, and it still takes 30 seconds. How did you get your polling more reliable? I’m not interested in supporting a second action yet. Just getting Vera to detect state change quickly is all I need.
ZWaver can probably explain it better, but I don’t believe it is about polling. If I look at my vera panel on my laptop, it sees a status change (my manually switching the light) almost immediately. Now, that switch may (and does) have a direct hop to the vera, so I know that the mesh network isn’t really a factor.
Because Vera sees these changes rather quickly, I can create a PLEG to ‘notice’ when I have cycled the light (On-Off-On) and if that has occurred within the set timeframe (say 10seconds) make something happen.
If you are familiar with PLEG, it looks like this:
DoSomething LightOn and (!LightOn; LightOn < 10)
translated into: DoSomething if (the light is now on) and (the light was turned on less than 10seconds from the last time it was turned off)
the problem with this is that it won’t be as reliable as a switch that supports instant updates, but I don’t find that it matters too much if the time in this example is enough to trap the status change in the window (10seconds).
My switch is close enough to Vera to do a direct route. Do you know how to setup the manual route to force this? I have tried a 0 and 1 in manual route field.
I am familiar with PLEG and have tried such sequences, but still the switch is being polled and status updates take forever so doing any logic on seconds timescale is worthless.
do you mind to take screenshots of your switch’s Advanced settings? Scroll down to shoot all of the settings. if you have been reconfiguring the settings, you may have made an unfriendly change.
I have mucked around with the settings a lot. The poll is currently set to 60, but I have tried down to 1s. I also added the AutoRoute variable to see how it was being routed (I think that is right).
Based on the above screen shots, there is no direct path between Vera and your device. Despite your assumptions about distances, Vera cannot talk directly with the device and the “pseudo Instant Status” that @BulldogLowell enjoys will not be possible for you.
A manual route of -70 is displayed. This suggests corruption and needs to be removed. Replacing it with a 0 will not help as 0(Vera) cannot speak directly with the device.
The polling interval setting is a maximum limit. As shown on the Settings tab it is “Poll this node at most once every”. It is not a minimum polling interval, so a 3 second setting does not mean that the device will be polled every 3 seconds, which is a good thing as the Z-Wave network would be saturate and completely useless at that rate. Vera is rarely going to poll a device more that once per minute.
My recommendations:
a) Exclude and include the device to reset it to factory defaults and eliminate errant configuration choices from when you “mucked around” with the settings.
b) Move the Vera to a location where it can indeed communicate directly with the device and perform one or more network heal operations after the relocation. The autoroute field, which should not be manually altered, will need to display a preferred direct/zero route (e.g. 0-5,35-15,107-22) for what you are trying to accomplish with the GE switch.
c) Spend the money on a switch that satisfies your needs.
d) Continue with your present setup and accept that the trigger, being updated by polling, will suffer a varying delay that could sometimes reach as much as ~2 minutes with default settings.
e) Abandon hope of using this GE switch as a scene/PLEG trigger.