RC-80 Thermostat Hangs

[BorisB]

Alan,

The RC-80 plugin looks fabulous! However, I (as well as some others, judging from the posts over the past year) have an issue with calls to RC-80 thermostats hanging Homeseer. Using the scripts, this manifested itself as a dialog box saying that the script had taken too long to execute, causing me to have to reboot the whole machine to get Homeseer working again (merely pressing cancel left the system frozen). I put all kinds of tracing in the script and was never able to pinpoint where the hang was occurring, and for which thermostat (I have 2). I was hoping the plugin could handle this timeout situation (which is not really a timeout as the script defined it), but this morning, I tried switching the window focus to Homeseer and got a dialog box to the effect that "Another application is busy, click to switch to it". The outside temperature had also stopped displaying on the thermostats. Clicking the "Switch to" button on this dialog box had no effect, and I had to exit Homeseer to get everything working again (although it seems like other events were able to process in the meantime). Can anyone shed some light on why this happens with RC-80s (I get it once every 3-5 days), and suggest how Alan can work around it in his excellent plugin? This is my only Homeseer stability issue, and the outside temp display is the only thing my wife likes in my whole HA implementation!

Boris

[sbessel]

What scripts are you running?

I am running Alan's plug-in on two RC122 tstats, and I use no supporting scripts. I don't have any hanging issues.

I only have one script that makes a call to change schedules when chaning home/away modes and that works fine, but it is only a single line of code.

[BorisB]

I was refering to the original Homeseer thermostat scripts. I'm not saying that there's a problem with Alan's plugin, what I'm saying is that there is an occasional hardware glitch that people see with these Omnistats that he may not be aware of and is not handling. This problem is also referred to here. You actually posted in that thread, but I don't know if wpiman ever actually got his "glitch" to stop.

Boris

[sbessel]

ahhh... yes, I have the glitch and I do beleive that Alan has taken care of it. I saw it on very early versions of his plug-in and I know he worked very hard to handle errors like that.

[Rick Tinker]

Yes, running Alan's plug-in here and no hang-ups whatsoever. Just ditch the scripts and come on over to the plug-in!! We will yank the scripts from HomeSeer soon after this is done anyway!

So come on in - the water is fine!

I have an RC-80 on the plug-in and this weekend (with luck) we will get another build that has support for heat pump thermostats, so my other two RC-100s will get moved over too.

[BorisB]

I can see from rereading my original post that I wasn't being too clear. I have actually moved from the scripts to the plugin, and I am still getting "the hang". The dialog box I am getting has a title of Homeseer, but I don't know if that's really Homeseer issuing it or Windows, since it happens when I am trying to do things like scroll the log window. It seems that certain events from the thermostat are still logged (like temperature change and system on/off), but the outside temperature stops updating.

Boris

[wegienka]

Boris,
I do not think the plug-in should be causing the "dialog box". I believe, and Rick can correct me, but the dialog box I think you mean only appears during a call to WaitEvents. The plug-in does no calls like this and communication with the thermostat has no loops or wait states like the script does.

That being said, the plug-in is still beta and has bugs, so it might be causing the problem. Can you let me know more about your configuration, and the options you have enabled for the thermostats?

Alan

[BorisB]

Alan,

I am running 2 RC-80's daisy-chained together. One is Aidr conditioning only (stat #1), and one is heat only (stat #2). I am not using any scheduling on them at this time; the scheduling tab does have all times filled in, but all the temps are the same. Currently, the heating thermostat is set to off. The air conditioning thermostat is physically set to "Hold", and the mode (cool/off) is being cycled manually (WAF issue). The thermostats are on Com4, fed off a PCI 4-serial port card (Brainboxes). Items to display on the AC themostat are all checked except Heat Set Point, and all controls are checked except Heat (nice touch there). For the Heat stat, all display items are checked except Fan Status (it's hot water heat) and Cool Set Point. Controls are all UNCHECKEd except Heat, Off and Hold.

This used to drive me nuts when I was using the scripts. Since the stats stop displaying the outside temp, it leads me to believe this has something to do with them. Is there some sort of debugging/tracing I could turn on to try to give you more info on this?

BorisB

[Jim Doolittle]

Alan/Rick,

I am seeing something similar to what is reported in this topic.

I am finishing up the RCS X10 Thermostat Plug-In and am also encountering what I would call "pauses" rather than "hangs". I am using a "Wait" (WaitModule.bas) so that I can confirm that commands were received by the unit and processed.

I see no jump in CPU and no popups. Only a the inability to work with the HS GUI for several seconds at a time.

Any ideas?

[sbessel]

Boris,

I used to have a lot of troubles communicating with my 2 RC-122 tstats. I found that running the PSTAT.EXE program cleared up a lot of problems, it is like it reset the tstats, I can't explain it. PSTAT is an HAI program, I am not sure if it is leagal to post. Pstate.exe will alos let you test your communications outside of the HS environment, these is very helpful in pinpointing the problem.

Second I moved my communications to Com1 off of my Moxa boards.

Is is possible that you are also running the old scripts? I know when I first installed the plug-in I still had the thermosat scripts selected for my tstat devices, and that caused all kinds of errors.

(if you email me off-line I can forward a copy of pstat)

[wegienka]

Boris,
You can enable debug mode using the following script command:

hs.plugin("HAI RC Thermostat").Debug = True

The debug stuff has not kept up with the plug-in, but I am willing to add what is needed to dianose your problem. Try this and let me take a look at the log file. EMail address is in my profile.

Alan

[Rick Tinker]

JimDoo,

I have seen the momentary UI pauses and it has been driving me crazy - I already alerted Alan that I thought it might be his plug-in, but am working with him currently to confirm. His plug-in is not written in VB, so the WaitModule does not apply unless he has the same thing it is doing coded in C++.

A while back Rich changed the way WaitSecs works so that it does a better type of wait, but there are many times when you don't want a whole second of waiting. It is an option to call hs.WaitSecs though if you are waiting more than a second.

The only thing that should be holding up the HomeSeer UI like this is one of two things: A plug-in or HomeSeer itself is in a tight loop doing some processing so the app is not getting any GUI events processed, or a plug-in has called the plug-in API function EnterCriticalEvent (or is it EnterCriticalSection?) which forces HomeSeer to hold off so the plug-in can do some critical processing that may need some CPU. A level 16 trace running in HomeSeer might expose which is causing this, but that creates a lot of data in itself. I think more data from others along with a list of other plug-ins installed may help. I removed a couple of plug-ins that I thought might be contributing while I try to figure out the cause - experimenting like this may help us figure out what is going on.

[Jim Doolittle]

Rick,

I do not see this phenomenom unless I am using the RCS X10 Plug-In. I am using the hs.ExecX10NoLog and am now testing whether it makes a difference if I explicitly use Wait-False parameter.

[BorisB]

Alan,

I will try this when I get home and send you the trace when it hang again.

Thanks,
Boris

"Keel Moose and Squirrel!"

[sbessel]

So Boris,

Any news? is it working?