HouseBot

I'm having a little difficulty with the polling of zWave devices, both real-time (with the "Get Status" property), and using the "Polling" property. I can't seem to get them to work reliably..

The basic problem is that it doesn't seem to work at times, but I haven't been able to find a pattern or root cause of when it doesn't. I have 8 devices set up (4 lamp modules and 4 switches), and at times polling will work fine, but at others, a (or a couple of the) devices won't respond (ie, the "Get Status" property never reverts back to "No"). Restarting the HB server may resolve the issue with the problem device, but other devices may start acting up.

I was hoping to get around this problem by setting the polling interval, but they both seem to be affected by the same issue - Sometimes the polling interval works, sometimes not, but not on consistent devices. The two ARE mutually inclusive, though - If I can't poll using "Get Status," then the polling interval doesn't work, and vice versa.

Thoughts? Is there other information I can collect to help troubleshoot this?

Thanks in advance.

Does the get status function timeout and display an error after a bit? Are there any other z-wave error messages?

Doesn't seem so - I've had the Get Status function still be set to Yes with no error messages for hours at a time. Another tid-bit of information - Even when the Get Status function seems to hang, I can still use the Power State property to turn the devices on and off, so communications is still there....

I'm going to start on a bunch of Z-Wave work in a few weeks. I'll try and address this in that work.

I realize this is a very old thread. I am however having the same issue and I have yet to find a solution in the forums. Is it the expectation that polling is still unreliable? I have tested multiple zwave modules that have all been tested within 5 feet of the z stick. they all continue to respond to changing power state but all fail at some point (every couple of days that I checked) to respond to polling or polling has failed in HB. I am testing fully before actually implementing within my home. I have tested a screw in lamp module, an outlet (no dimming), and a plug in appliance module which all suffer from this.

Hi Chester,

Sorry to hear about those problems, I have had the same problem for some months.

When you use the polling interval, it is actually the same as periodically setting it to "get status", so they should behave exactly the same way.
When I tested this some months ago, i came to the conclusion that somehow Housebot will not get the status from the zwave node, and keep waiting for that status.
Your whole network will still work (other controllers can still get the status and switch / dim the device) but only Housebot wont work.

Could you perhaps try the following?
As a test, I made 2 devices for each zwave Node, so for example: test_lamp1 (Node 1) and copy-test_lamp1 (also Node 1).
Use 1 of every copy to do the polling automaticly every 10 seconds or so.

Now, when the device stops polling (and the polling stays on YES) You use the copy of the device to try to poll your zwave node.
If my assumption is right, the copy of the device should still work, and we indeed are having the same problem.

Follow up question:
What brand / type of controller and zwave devices do you use? I had these problems (and more) with the ACT ZCU-201 controller.
All of my ACT build in Dimmers work perfectly (never have to ask them for their status as they are associated with my controller and send out their status by themselves when operated locally) but I did have these problems a lot with my DUWI switches.

Eventually I simply stopped using the polling all together: My ACT switches didnt need it, and I use the DUWI switches in places where only HouseBot can controll them, so they also dont need the status requests anymore.

Regards,
LostDreamer

ps. After I got these problems I made a PHP script to do my zwave operations instead of HouseBot, and I had no problems with that, commands and status requests worked everytime, so I think this is actually a bug in the zwave part of housebot.