ZWave-2 acting as sensor relay

[ewenjc]

With a Fibaro Universal Sensor it should be possible to encode the status of all sensors plus alarm state and wire it direct to comfort rather than wire it to the PIRs. It would need a bit of programming, but it seems crazy to buy a device designed for systems that can\'t talk zwave, given that comfort can talk zwave. I\'ve also wondered whether it is possible to use UCM/ETH3 to send an http message to Fibaro HC2 in order to pass on sensor activation.

Passing on information about the alarm state and sensors was my main reason for getting Zwave UCM and upgrading my comfort v1 to new board. So it is rather frustrating that it doesn\'t support it. I\'ve not yet found a way to get Fibaro HC2 to poll comfort\'s virtual node. The virtual node as seen by Fibaro HC2 seems to be missing key data, e.g. version, zwave protocol type, zwave protocol version etc.

I understand that comforts virtual node as a switch is very useful for instructing comfort to do various things from a zwave device. However, in order for comfort to tell other zwave devices what it\'s doing it seem that we need a second type of virtual node that acts like a sensor (send message on status change). With these two types of virtual nodes we could do most things.

Please can we have an option to choose the type of virtual node; switch or sensor?
Ewen

[juwi_uk]

Get\'s my vote! 

[Ingo]

+1 for a MultilevelSensor Virtual node.

[slychiu]

I\'ve not yet found a way to get Fibaro HC2 to poll comfort\'s virtual node. The virtual node as seen by Fibaro HC2 seems to be missing key data, e.g. version, zwave protocol type, zwave protocol version etc.

That is not true. UCM/ZWAVE supplies all the required information to any Zwave device polling it.

Please note that UCM/Zwave is a Zwave-certified device so it has been tested by Zwave to comply with all the necessary requirements.

The Fibaro Universal Sensor and HC2 are NOT Zwave-certified, as you can verify at http://z-wavealliance.org/
It is more appropriate to ask Fibaro why they are not able to obtain any information or set the polling time, and why they are not certified. If they comply with Zwave standards then they should be able to set the polling time.

I believe for your case you just need to find out why the Fibaro is not able to poll the Virtual node, but the correct party to answer this is Fibaro

Otherwise a workaround to Fibaros problem is to get the zone to send on and off status to another Fibaro mode and get the HC2 to poll that

I understand that comforts virtual node as a switch is very useful for instructing comfort to do various things from a zwave device. However, in order for comfort to tell other zwave devices what it\'s doing it seem that we need a second type of virtual node that acts like a sensor (send message on status change). With these two types of virtual nodes we could do most things. Please can we have an option to choose the type of virtual node; switch or sensor?

This is not an easy subject, and is related to how zwave works

Zwave does not in general broadcast any change in state of any device or node. A more useful function from the automation perpective is that any change in state is automatically sent to the devices that are associated with it. This is the behaviour of C-Bus, KNX and most other automation systems. Instead, any device which wants to know the status needs to keep polling the node. Too much polling is discouraged by Zwave for the reason that it clogs up the RF and may interfere with other traffic


Z-wave has been adding many command classes as time goes by, and it is not a trivial matter to support a new class. The UCM/Zwave needs to handle many different tasks related to the class, and it needs to be recertified for every new class that is supported which is not cheap.

The sensor class is one class that is able to send its sensor status to the controller, and this is a recent addition. However the comfort zone status is not a Sensor, it is a switch ie has on/off state. Having many PIRs sending on/off status constantly to Zwave may also be a problem for the RF.

[juwi_uk]

Hmm yep i forgot your recertification costs; makes you wonder if it\'s worth the paper it\'s written on then as if Fibaro doesn\'t have it doesn\'t seem to be stopping them storming the market and being successful. 
I assumed you needed to have certification to be able to use the zwave logo?  If you can still promote as ZWave without it then I\'d plump for functionality over certification any day.
Some of the challenges i feel, and i had early problematic firmware ACT modules when i started out with ZWave  and still the case it seems with all devices I\'ve added since is that you can\'t upgrade the firmware and hence why i guess certification is important up front.
Cytech are the same with the ZWave daughter card.   If you could somehow build in flash program-ability  like we have with the eth3  then with Cytechs brilliant firmware and responsive customer support you\'d be able to be really agile supporting new features/libraries come into service.
Ju

[ewenjc]

I agree that getting Fibaro HC2 to poll the virtual node appears to be a Fibaro issue and I am looking into that on the Fibaro Forum.

I also agree that polling in general is not a great solution. With frequent polling it results in way too much additional RF traffic and with infrequent polling the information is old news before the message has been delivered. A sensor class virtual node seems to be the only effective way to communicate a change in state as it happens with a minimum of messages.

[ewenjc]

Good News (ish)
I have successfully got a virtual node to show a change in state from comfort to Fibaro HC2 (in my example its a wired comfort sensor being triggered that sets a comfort counter that is associated with the zwave virtual node). I was not able to specify the polling frequency but it appears to be using a default that gets the message delivered in approx 7-15 minutes.
The delay in getting the message polled means this approach is of no real use for turning on lights when a sensor triggers, but the delay will not be too much of a problem for logic based on the alarm being set (i.e. house occupied or not).

Hi Chiu,
I appreciate the recertification cost is an issue and have 2 ideas that may or may not get around that;

> Is it at all possible to have a beta software for the zwave UCM, with all necessary disclaimers (i.e. not certified), that includes a sensor type virtual node?

> Would it be possible to add a confirmation message to the existing dimmer type virtual node. Typically a zwave dimmer is instructed to set to a specific level and the dimmer then sends a confirmation that it has set to that level. I\'m guessing that the comfort virtual node doesn\'t broadcast any type of confirmation message. Would it be possible to add a confirmation message that would be visible to the primary controller within the current certification?

Thanks
Ewen

[slychiu]

Thanks for the suggestions
we wil discuss it internally

7 to 15 minutes seems much too long. Is it consistent?

[slychiu]

I have successfully got a virtual node to show a change in state from comfort to Fibaro HC2 (in my example its a wired comfort sensor being triggered that sets a comfort counter that is associated with the zwave virtual node). I was not able to specify the polling frequency but it appears to be using a default that gets the message delivered in approx 7-15 minutes.

The slow polling frequency of 7 to 15 minutes is controlled by Fibaro

The delay in getting the message polled means this approach is of no real use for turning on lights when a sensor triggers, but the delay will not be too much of a problem for logic based on the alarm being set (i.e. house occupied or not).

I think a better solution is to use the Counter or Flag to send a zwave command so it acts instantanously. If a counter is mapped to a Zwave in Zwave mapping then any change in the counter or flag will correspndingly turn on or off the mapped zwave address

> Is it at all possible to have a beta software for the zwave UCM, with all necessary disclaimers (i.e. not certified), that includes a sensor type virtual node?

That is a possibility but it stil involves quite a bit of development time, which we are in short supply as there are many projects under development

a zwave dimmer is instructed to set to a specific level and the dimmer then sends a confirmation that it has set to that level. 

Would it be possible to add a confirmation message that would be visible to the primary controller within the current certification?

That is incorrect. The dimmer does not send a confirmation message to the controller. The controller polls the dimmer to confirm that it has changed state. This behaviour is mandated by Zwave

[ewenjc]

Thanks for the reply.

I\'ve given up on polling. The 7-15 minutes was wrong, it sometimes takes over an hour so I think I got lucky on the first few tests. I think standard polling is not happening at all, possibly because the controller doesn\'t like the virtual node - it has no values set for things like Zwave protocol type and protocol version so it may not know which version of message to use to poll it (still waiting for Fibaro support to get back to me about why it won\'t allow a polling interval to be set). But even if it did work constant polling is a bad idea.

I have a work around in place that uses a Fibaro Dimmer Module with no load. Comfort sets the level to (a+b); a = 0,20,40,60,80 to represent security mode (off, away, day, night & holiday), b = the id of the triggered zone. The Fibaro controller watches for changes to this dimmer and sets 2 variables; security_mode and sensor_id. Other scenes watch to see if the sensor_id is set to their value and trigger lights etc accordingly. It seems to work ok but I\'ve not tested with multiple triggers yet. Response time is about 1 second and no polling. But it is a waste of a perfectly decent dimmer module. Comfort setting the zwave dimmer value to a specific number is being done per zone as I can\'t see how to set the dimmer value with a specific calculated number.

Your last point about confirmation message is a surprise. I though zwave received confirmation (one of the reasons it\'s superior to X10 which didn\'t confirm success). If I get Comfort to set a dimmer value, the Fibaro controller knows that this was successful. If this is polling it must be polled immediately rather that on a timed basis. How does the controller know that it should poll the dimmer unless a zwave device told it it should. I thought it might be association as the dimmers seems to be associated with the primary controller. If it is association is there any way to set the virtual node to have default association to id =1. Fibaro refuses to setup any association on the virtual node, possibly due to the missing parameters (as per above).