Anyone use Groups to sync Dimmers? Advice on increasing speed? (very slow for me)

[Ltek]

spud
I have been using ET Groups for syncing dimmers (never could get Zwave associations working properly)... I have several Static device groups across multiple rooms, each with 2 or 3 dimmers; one is a 4 dimmer group.

They are ALL very slow; 2-3 second sync response always. This large response delay is a problem since usually the master is not the one we are physically controlling, and thus it needs to sync to start the light turning on - so lighting gets a huge delay and is troublesome.

Homeseer itself is super fast on my 8 core PC. Direct device changes, etc are all milliseconds. Event events that have multiple hops (more latency) are under 1 second, like a motion/lighting event that loos like this... Zigbee motion sensor -> deconz/conbee -> Jowihue/Homeseer -> HS Zwave Plugin -> Zwave dimmer

So I suspect ET Group might be causing the delay?

I appreciate any advice / tips you all might have!

Example event attached (Advanced Options : Priority Event is enabled)

[lj502]

I use the linked device in the device feature page, light 1 to light 2, 2 to 3, and 3 back to1, any one changes and others follow almost instantly, I have used Easytrigger also but for like devices I just use this, easy to test out.
John

[Ltek]

lj502 I tried that when I first got the dimmers (zooz ZEN30) but it never worked correctly... I'll try it again now knowing someone has it working well. thx!

[Ltek]

lj502 I tried it again on my 4 dimmer set in the Kitchen... no go. Not sure if there is a problem with the ZEN30s or a bug in HS4 with that specific dimmer. And trying to figure that out is likely futile since debug logging in HS only provide about 50% of the needed info. I'm going to try ZWave associations again.

Hoping someone has a way to do this with ET with nearly instant response times

[lj502]

Well that's no good, I just setup a new link with 2 z-wave dimmers and it worked fine, GE-Jasco I think. I have devices controlled with MQTT, Tasmota flashed led controllers and they work fine also. One question, do those switches have parent devices, if so make sure you didn't link to the parent but the actual controllable one, just a thought.
John

[lj502]

Another question, If you create an event changing each light one after the other in that event do they respond quickly?

[randy]

lj502… trying to figure that out is likely futile since debug logging in HS only provide about 50% of the needed info.

The default logging is minimal. There are more verbose modes available. The mode can be entered with an immediate command in the control panel (HS3) or Script Commands (HS4).

[Ltek]

lj502 Yes, I initially has the 2-dimmer pairs/set the way you mention... the event would directly set both dimmers using the HS4 Device, not using ET at all. It was fast, for sure. The only thing I miss about Insteon is the direct associations were easy and worked instantly. Zwave has too many years under its belt to not have caught up to Insteon from 15 years ago. Though I say that about many things (yeah Randy, I know)

randy I've used debug many many times... admittedly not tried to use it with Linked Devices. In general Debug is missing so many things I stopped using it unless the system is crashing, literally. Even with Debug items and processing is not always exposed. For instance: no logging of an Event trigger and the associated values. So, if that event has 2 or 3 'OR' statements, you really dont know what triggered the event. Also, I've had race conditions that were impossible to figure out. We need a way to trace a single event, not just show 1000s of lines of logging and try to sort through it.

[Ltek]

lj502 I updated the firmware and the Zooz ZEN30 are working as HS4 Linked Devices now. I suspect there was a status reporting issue in the last FW rev.
Did some more testing... and while it is faster (about 1-2 seconds) than using an Event with an ET Group (2-4 seconds) still a noticeable lag.
I'm tyring Zwave Associations again and so far I may be figuring it out, tho not exactly sure if its correct. It seems way faster than Linked Devices for sure. Wish I could find specific details on the "right" way to set Zwave associations. Its not clear how to setup the associations / endpoints.

[PCK]

I've tried associating both the HS-WX300's together and the HS-WD200's together with out success a couple years ago. In my events I would only control the "master" switch and let the association take care of itself, as least that was what I was hoping for. The issue I was seeing was a race condition where the master would update the slave and the slave would update the master again and again until the whole zwave network would crater to a stop. I finally dropped trying to get this fixed due to lack of interest by all parties involved. But now since these issues have raised their ugly head again, let's collectively try to get these resolved.

So, what I'm suggesting here is if everyone that is having problems associating their zwave switches together, especially HST's branded switches with HS4, please open a support ticket and maybe just maybe we will get someone's attention at HST.

PCK

[Michael McSharry]

I have only dabbled with Zwave with some specialized devices and have never looked into the actual communication protocol so I can only conjecture based upon my general experiences with various technologies. It is easiest for the application software that needs to share a single hardware interface to fully complete one transaction and then move onto the next. A transaction will typically back and forth communications that end with either a successful status update or a timeout. Retries may be part of the transaction.

Another approach is in a single command to make a group request and then follow up with collecting status and do retries where expected status is not received. This later approach is only available if the underlying technology supports a group or wildcard type communication. It also means the control software needs to be smarter to recognize when the parallel rather than serial mode should be used. Even X10 supported the group concept so I would expect Zwave to do as well.

There should be snooping tools available to collect the Zwave communications and observe where the delays exist. Something like wireshark that is used for Ethernet analysis. I have never looked into snooping Zwave.

While I do not have a solution, perhaps the above will trigger some ideas for investigation.

[Ltek]

There are multiple bugs in teh Zwave plugin. Not only with how it associates devices but debug logs show delays when processing device commands. I can show consistent multi-second (3 to 10) gaps between sending Zwave commands to 3 or 4 devices in an EasyTrigger group which are all set at once by the EasyTrigger plugin. Its faster to set them all separately but the delays are still there. Based on how kluged everything in HS is, I'm positive the problem is the Zwave plugin just barely works (literally).

Quick update specific to ZEN30 associations & Homeseer...

Zooz got back to me and the ZEN30 does not support Multilevel associations (so much for modern hardware).

HS4...
Homeseer is not handling associations correctly with the ZEN30. It creates improper (literally) associations if not using an Endpoints. I opened a ticket but since I use Zwave PI v3, they told me to update to v4 -- ya know, the one that has more bugs and less features. I'd bet v4 has the same bug. Interestingly, associations using Endpoint 1 get associated to the proper devices in v3. Rich only integrated Zwave ingot Homeseer 20 yrs ago, so in another 10 years Rich might have most of the bugs worked out.