View single post by slychiu
 Posted: Sunday Dec 4th, 2016 11:09 am
 PM  Quote  Reply  Full Topic 
slychiu



Joined: Saturday Apr 29th, 2006
Location: Singapore
Posts: 5493
Status: 
Offline

  back to top

MDKKEN, you have a good knowledge of the working of Zwave

We have discussed your suggestions

You are right that the learning process in UCM/Zwave is a 2 step process. First the UCM gets the node information from the primary, and 2nd the uCM addresses each node directly to find out what they are, eg Basic, Multilevel switch etc. If there is no reply from the node, the UCM/Zwave will set the node to Basic.

The first suggestion is that in the 2nd phase, the UCM/zwave does not check the multilevel switch nodes and instead, go only to the basic nodes and find out their info.

However the problem is that the Controller may have already deleted some nodes and made other changes, so a limited learn like this may miss out these changes and get left with the wrong node information

Actually the reason that the learning process fails and causes some nodes to revert to basic is due to a problem with the Zwave network itself. Not getting a reply means the UCM is unable to communicate  with the node. This may mean that controlling the device may not work correctly or may be intermittent, and that even if the device remains as Multilevel it may not work correctly. The Zwave network problem may be due to the node being ourt of reach or there may be blind spots in the network.

Perhaps adding more nodes to the mesh may improve the situation.
This is  similar to the problem faced by Lwillerton. after using a zniffer, it was found that one of the nodes was blocked, which caused the network problems.


The 2nd suggestion is using a drop-down list to select a node type for each device. However this practice is not allowed by Zwave, and it will refuse to certify any device which behaves this way


A possible option is to be able to select a particular node and be able to query it individually. This needs changes in Comfigurator and UCM/Zwave firmware

The performance of the zwave network especially when it is large and in a large house may still be an issue. Does anyone have any experience to share? Are there problems controlling devices intermittently?

 Close Window