Mark battery device as failed to remove it not working?

Discussions about Z-Way software and Z-Wave technology in general
pz1
Posts: 2053
Joined: 08 Apr 2012 13:44

Mark battery device as failed to remove it not working?

Post by pz1 »

I have many problems with using Danfoss Living Connect. The only result that I have is that two sets of batteries have been completely drained in a total of 5 days. This is in sharp contrast with the typical periods of 1 to 2 years published by Danfoss.
So I decided to remove the device from Zwave.me. As it is a battery operated device I tried to mark it as 'failed'. Nothing visible happens. The field Remove failed node remains grayed out, and I can not select a device node to actually remove the device.
Even though I now (actually > 24hours ago) have removed the batteries, in the device status dialog it is not marked as dead.
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PoltoS
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Joined: 26 Jan 2011 19:36

The "Mark as failed button"

Post by PoltoS »

The "Mark as failed button" was broken in last update. The problem was fixed, but Z-Cloud was not updated yet - we will do it soon.

The status of the device will not change, since there would be no packet exchange until the device sends wakeup notification. So, it will remain "working in deep sleep" until we fix the button in Z-Cloud. This is not a problem for your network.

The most reasonable explanation of problems with your thermostat is a problem in communications during inclusion process. Danfoss Living Connect is very sensible in timings and reacts in a very strange way if the expected packet is not received. Even comments from Danfoss tech team expressed this as "Living Connect will panic if the packet flow is abrupted". So, you can try to re-include the device. Note that big delays to our server will break packet flow with Living Connect due to timings. Unfortunatelly this is a problem of cloud solutions
pz1
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Joined: 08 Apr 2012 13:44

Z-Cloud unfit as a controller for Danfoss Living Connect

Post by pz1 »

So I must conclude that ZWave.me, and Z-Cloud in particular, is not a good solution to drive DLC's until either the ZBox is available, or until the Zwave software is available to install on a local server in my house. (This morning it took about 3 minutes for the Z-Connector Loop to be fully started, over a 30/3 Mbit connection!!!)
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PoltoS
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The long connetion problem was fixed.

Post by PoltoS »

And this long connection was not the cause of your problems. The speed of your connection does not matter neither - most important is delays to our server and back (ping). And keep in mind that Danfoss Living Connect is a strange device - Danfoss do not explain us (even us!) how it works internally. We don't understand it's logics clearly and have to guess a lot. I seems to work with good connection to Z-Cloud, but even not everytime - sometimes it goes in troubles.
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PoltoS
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Danfoss Living Connect is not good. It is.

Post by PoltoS »

But it is strange. First of all this device uses Climate Schedule Control Command Class, which was mostly designed by Danfoss (they were the driver in this process) and it is the only company to use it. Several months ago another Command Class called Schedule was released and is not supposed to substitute the Climate Schedule Control. So, Danfoss Living Connect will be the only device to support it and Z-Way will remain the only software to support it :)

Certification process did not helped much, because it checks that device replies correctly to requests and have proper implementation, but never tests timing and interaction with other devices. This is now changing in Z-Wave, since for complex devices it is essencial to test devices not only agains synthetic tests, but also in "real battle". Again, there were no other implementation of Climate Schedule Control during certification of Danfoss Living Connect.

You can also use the device without Climate Scedule Control and set temperature on each wakeup (so, use Thermostat SetPoint only). This is how Fibaro, Vera and others implemented it. Not sure it works good, since Danfoss did never expected such behaviour to get good battery performance. You can use this mode in Z-Way too - it just requires some minor tricks. But it is not worth, IMHO.

We have several working installations with these thermstats (most having Z-Way locally) and once installed, there were not problems. But during inclusion we alse experienced problems and we needed to exclude-include back. May be it is worth to write to Danfoss about these problems?....

So far, we are the only fully to support their device and they have not even tested it! They had a look on it, but not tested! May be once being in Danmark we will go visit them and show these problems in live to debug together...
Manders
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Joined: 17 Apr 2012 05:42

"You can also use the device

Post by Manders »

"You can also use the device without Climate Scedule Control and set temperature on each wakeup (so, use Thermostat SetPoint only). This is how Fibaro, Vera and others implemented it. Not sure it works good, since Danfoss did never expected such behaviour to get good battery performance. You can use this mode in Z-Way too - it just requires some minor tricks. But it is not worth, IMHO."

How exactly would we do this? I'm losing patience with this and just want it to do what its supposed to do...
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PoltoS
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I can not say how much Z

Post by PoltoS »

I can not say how much Z-Cloud users uses DLC, but some have reported to configure them successfully. I did it many times too. But keep in mind, you are using product for free in a cloud scenario, which can not garuantee same performance and reliability as local installation. We do our best, but we can not guaranty that delays from your location to our servers would be less than 50ms. Personally at home I've 70ms, which is pretty ok but when it goes above 100-150 some communications can mess up.We also understand that you are ready to purchase our software and pay for it, but we are not ready to support many users with their own hardware. We are working hard on Z-Box solution, which we believe will give the best experiene with Z-Wave. Including interaction with Danfoss living connect devies. Unfortunatelly we can not give you precise info on the release date yet.
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PoltoS
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You can put the thermostat

Post by PoltoS »

You can put the thermostat into manual control and use Scenes actions to send ThermostatSetPoint commands. Then use a Schedule to execute these different Scenes (with different temperature). This should work with no problems.There is also a way to use same Climate Schedules GUI to send ThermostatSetPoint commands automatically, but this requires to turn off completely the support of ClimateControlSchedule Command Class in Z-Way. This requires edit of Defaults.xml file. There is no easy GUI to do it, but there is an example in Recipes thread of this forum about turning off Autoconfig feature. In same way one can alter NodeInformationFrame tag <NodeInformationFrame>
<value>["ManufacturerSpecific", "Clock", "MultiChannel", "Version", "MultiCmd", "ClimateControlSchedule", "SimpleAVControl", "SwitchMultilevel", "NodeNaming", "Time", "SceneActivation", "Basic"]</value>
<description>Controllers own NIF</description>
</NodeInformationFrame>
to <NodeInformationFrame>
<value>["ManufacturerSpecific", "Clock", "MultiChannel", "Version", "MultiCmd", "SimpleAVControl", "SwitchMultilevel", "NodeNaming", "Time", "SceneActivation", "Basic"]</value>
<description>Controllers own NIF</description>
</NodeInformationFrame>
(ClimateControlSchedule have to be removed from the list). After this a re-inclusion of DLC is required to let it know that the gateway do not support ClimateControlSchedule anymore.We suggest you to go with the first solution not to mess up too much.
pz1
Posts: 2053
Joined: 08 Apr 2012 13:44

Appreciation of your work

Post by pz1 »

Let me reassure you that I highly appreciate that you do make this publicly available. I also highly appreciate your sharing of knowledge with us!

Yesterday and today, I noticed that I can connect much quicker to Z-Cloud than I previously reported. It was almost instantaneous both days. I just pinged a few times in 15 minutes to z-cloud.zwave.me. values were around 40 ms +/- 2
So as soon as the software allows me to remove my failed DLC from my present setup I will give it a new try.

PS: I just noticed a behaviour in my map that I had not seen before: Shortly after the start, the zone where the DLC is located gets a black background color, only interrupted by very short periods of returning to normal. Does this have a special meaning? I could find it in the manual.



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PoltoS
Posts: 7565
Joined: 26 Jan 2011 19:36

We have improved stability of

Post by PoltoS »

We have improved stability of the service last week. It should work faster now. Have a try, may be your DLC will work now.

As for the colour of your zone, it is probably a Chrome/Firefox bug. We don't experience this. Unless if you have assigned a colour to your active scene.
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