View single post by GeoffF
 Posted: Thursday Jan 21st, 2021 02:25 pm
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GeoffF

 

Joined: Thursday Jan 21st, 2021
Location: United Kingdom
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I'm stuck. I have a large Z wave network with a comfort alarm chosen because of its Z Wave capability and a Fibaro HC2. The system has 49 devices and 19 scenes many of which run to over 100 lines of LUA code. I have communication between Comfort and HC2 based on Comfort counters. One counter 16 I set to a certain value from a "device" or rather a dimmer device object in HC2, which various "responses" in Comfort  take as instructions to arm or disarm (with necessary 99 over 254 scaling.)The other way I used another counter 15 to be set by comfort to various values to indicate the alarm state (day, night etc.). I set another device object in HC2 to poll the virtual device associated with the counter and I know the alarm state. This is used for example to detect the number of days the house is alarmed (and empty) and after 2 days reduce the heating and ventilation.
For operational purposes e.g. after commanding an "arm" event in Comfort we do not assume it is set. We take the Comfort alarm state counter 15 which is being polled by HC2 to tell us the alarm status (because it might be "failed to arm"). This works well and from our HC2 phone app we can check if the house is armed and if not force it and see the status coming back saying it has worked. This can sometimes be required because alarm setting is usually caused by the garage door (final exit door) closing as we drive away and we cannot hear the external siren give a beep.
To get reasonable response the polling on counter 15 is set to every 20 seconds. My Zwave network is large and the house is large so many commands take multiple hops  with 5 or 6,  3 hop routes. Commands can take a second or more to complete across the network after route discovery.I am coming to realise that this is near practical capacity for a single Z Wave system and there is a distinct need to reduce network activity. (I have tackled this within the HC2 by ensuring we don't issue commands when we know the device is in the right state and, if we do send a command over the network, we wait about 10 seconds before sending another. This certainly helps.) All the native HC2 devices are direct push and pull with no polling. (The HC2 controller as device 1 is associated with each remote device so it is directly updated with state changes.) 
However when I look at the total network traffic well over half of it is the 20 second polling of the Comfort alarm. From Z Wave 7.061 I should be able to get the Counter 15 "alarm state" to directly update the device object in HC2 when it changes. Thus I dramatically reduce the network traffic. But I can't.
Counter 15 is set up in a (Comfort) virtual device pointing to a dimmer object in HC2 However although I can set a response on the counter change I cannot specify the network object to where it should direct the update. It happens by coincidence to be object 15 in the Z Wave network This is because Device ID 15 is in the Z Wave mapping table as a "green" virtual device  and not a Routing slave. I cant change it to the latter in configurator. I can't set up a new pairing with HC2 except by the virtual device route because of course there is no Physical device 15.
I'm also having trouble persuading the Comfort board to Learn any new devices in the network. It is stuck at the time it was added as id 14 a static controller. I can get configurator to the point in "Learn" where it is waiting for transfer but not sure which buttons to press in the HC2 interface. Do you happen to know. Is it just the add static controller function again. I have tried it, but to no avail!
Can you help?
Geoff Foden 

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