Feature request - communications status

[DeLicious]

As anyone who happens to read the cocoontech boards as well knows, I have been having recurring intermittent noise problems that are interfering with UPB communications over the past several months.

I was wondering if i could request a feature on the UPB HSPI that could test the communications status of UPB. My idea was that it would simply send a device polling request to a device configurable by the user (so I could make sure it was either far away or on the other phase). It could do so at a defined interval, or let the user define the interval. Or even, perhaps, have one interval (30 minutes or an hour) when the status is okay (probably stored in a virtual device) and another interval when communications is bad (5 minutes, so that we have a finer-grained idea of when we are functional again). Does this sound like a good idea to anyone else?

What I really hope to accomplish is to have HS send me a text message on my phone when it detects communications failure so that I can a) diagnose the problem better, b) see how often this really happens to me, and c) not be caught by surprise when this is happening.

[anogee]

If you haven't used it yet, there is a really good communications tet feature in UPStart. You can have it test at any intervals and log the results. Unfortunately HS can't run at the same time.

[DeLicious]

do you think it would be allowed to run it on another computer while hs is running on my main machine? i think the restriction is you can't run it with homeseer because only one program should control the PIM at any one time, but i have an extra PIM I could put on another computer.

[Michael McSharry]

UPStart and the more detailed information typically communicated in pulse mode while the HS UPB plugin communicates in message mode. You should be able to run UPStart diagnostics based upon failure reports from HS, but I suspect the automation of this will not be possible.

When I had a UPB problem in the past it was very repeatable, but I was never able to isolate the cause of the problems I was seeing. They just went away after a few weeks. If you try to run diagnositics when you see the problem the same thing may happen to you where the root cause of the problem is not isolated, but you have confirmation that communication between the PIM and module is degraded.

[DeLicious]

yes, i have been able to pause the upb plug-in and start upstart during one of my outages, and the powerline noise was off the charts. what i was hoping for was a way to better diagnose the behavior (when, how often, how long), but it doesn't seem like that will be possible for you