Question about specifying devices to poll

[simonmason]

Hi, I just installed recently and I am in the process of configuring the plugin. Great job but the way, this adds some much needed capabilities for those of us depending on batteries!

I noticed that so far it has detected a bunch of my devices. I noticed it hasn't found any of my door locks and one sensor I have attached to the doorbell circuit. I assume that these should be added manually in the dropdown in the "Select Devices that require polling" dropdown.

Why do they require polling? I know that they do report their battery status to homeseer - is the plugin not able to see that?

Do I need to change anything on those devices to accommodate this? I imagine if the plugin polls the doorbell sensor it is not going to respond because it needs waking up? Thanks.

[SteveMSJ]

Hi, I just installed recently and I am in the process of configuring the plugin. Great job but the way, this adds some much needed capabilities for those of us depending on batteries!

I noticed that so far it has detected a bunch of my devices. I noticed it hasn't found any of my door locks and one sensor I have attached to the doorbell circuit. I assume that these should be added manually in the dropdown in the "Select Devices that require polling" dropdown.

Why do they require polling? I know that they do report their battery status to homeseer - is the plugin not able to see that?

Do I need to change anything on those devices to accommodate this? I imagine if the plugin polls the doorbell sensor it is not going to respond because it needs waking up? Thanks.

The plug-in will find non-listening battery devices automatically by monitoring the log for wake-up messages. For battery devices that are always listening, such as locks, whilst the plug-in will know the battery level, as long as it is being reported to HS3, it uses Polling or Activity Checking to monitor whether the device is still alive.

Battery levels are monitored, and alerts can be set for these, but the most important function for me is to alert when the device dies, irrespective of what battery level might be reported. For non-listening devices the plug-in detects that the expected wake-up notification has been missed. For listening devices there are no wake-up notifications so the plug-in needs some other way to check that the device is still alive. You can choose Polling or Activity monitoring by selecting the particular battery device from the relevant lists on the plug-in Config page.

For locks I would recommend polling, and you can set the interval you want to use. The overhead is unlikely to be significant if you set the interval to a few hours. The plug-in spreads the polls out over the configured interval for all the devices you have chosen.

If you don't want to poll, or the particular device does not support polling, you can use Activity Checking. Again, at a configurable interval the plug-in will check all the child and root devices for a particular physical battery device to see if there has been any activity since the previous check. If there hasn't then it will be flagged as a missed wake-up and you will be alerted depending on how you have configured the alerting. This works fine for a device that has something that reports often, like a temperature sensor, but is not good for something like a window/door sensor which might not be operated for long periods. Of course most window/door sensors are non-listening devices anyway so would normally be monitored by wake-ups.

I would suspect that your doorbell sensor is a non-listening device in which case it won't appear in the list of devices that can be polled. The reason it hasn't been detected by the plug-in yet is probably that it has a long wake-up interval set which hasn't yet been reached. Do you know the details of this device and how long the wake-up interval is set to?

Steve

[simonmason]

All is good. It did eventually show up - it just took a few days.

[SteveMSJ]

All is good. It did eventually show up - it just took a few days.

You may want to shorten the wake-up interval a bit I n that device if you can.
Steve