3-way Auxiliary Switch with LED indicator light?

[ghires (Gary)]

Can I use the Leviton VP0SR-1LZ switch you suggested with my existing GE Master switch?

GE Z-Wave Plus Wireless Smart Lighting Control Smart Switch, On/Off, In-Wall, Includes White & Light Almond Paddles, Works with Amazon Alexa, 14291 - - Amazon.com

[SBDOBRESCU (Bobby)]

If you read the comments on Amazon, some people were successful at doing so. I personally didn’t try that.

[JDRoberts]

@ghires

Thank you all for the useful information! I greatly appreciate it. I’ll take a look at the various switches you have mentioned in this thread!

One more thing to consider is the length of warranty which generally reflects the quality of the engineering of the device.

Not coincidentally, the more expensive devices, Leviton and Cooper, have significantly longer warranties. They offer five year limited warranties. The GE’s and other switches of similar quality usually offer one or two year warranties. Whether that matters or not is a personal decision. I generally choose Longer warranty devices for things that have to be wired.

Another thing to be aware of is that a fairly significant percentage of GE/Jasco switches develop a problem about two years in where they don’t stay connected to the network. ( after the warranty period has expired.) Nothing to do with SmartThings, you’ll find the same complaints on forums for other controllers. You have to cut the current at the breaker before they’ll respond again. There are several topics in these forums from people having this issue. I don’t know if the problem still exists with the newest models.

[chrisb]

[quote=“JDRoberts, post:19, topic:25014, full:true”]
(I think you and I have briefly discussed the patent issue before but let me just say again that the patent was issued at a time when no one was doing it and a lot of engineering research went into how to do it. The patent was done long before Z-wave even existed. So yes, it was a significant breakthrough at the time. And patent-worthy. A lot of things seem obvious after they’re done the first time. )[/quote]

Well, if the patent was for HOW to send that communication, then I’ll grant that that is acceptable (not that anyone cares that much what I find acceptable. . ) But my understand was that it was for just the IDEA of reporting back. If I’m wrong I’ll back off my unreasonable hatred of Lutron… but I hate when facts get in the way of a good story.

Association allows the switch to send a message to the hub by including the hub in the association group. I’m pretty sure this is what the support person was trying to describe. What gets sent is a “basic” message, which would be an on/off to a light switch. The hub can be smart enough to realize, “oh, I got a basic request from this association group, that must mean that there was a state change.”

This sounds kinda like what they were saying… it wasn’t a specific: “My ‘on’ button has been pressed” message, more of a general: “Hey, look at me… something may have happened” sort of message. When then caused the hub to do:

Polling is just polling. The hub initiates the request to the switch for its current status.

So my general understanding was right, just a number of the finer details were off.

[bravenel (Bruce)]

@chrisb

So my general understanding was right, just a number of the finer details were off.

Among those details that, GE switches do not instant report, nor do they ordinarily participate in an association. What was described was right as to instant reporting devices that use hail(), but most devices do not.

[chrisb]

@bravenel

Among those details that, GE switches do not instant report, [/quote]

Yeah, if I said otherwise, sorry, that was wrong. But I believe I always said that GE/Jasco don’t have instant reporting.

[quote]nor do they ordinarily participate in an association. What was described was right as to instant reporting devices that use hail(), but most devices do not.

Okay, this was bugging me so much that I did some searching to try and find the original info that I got. Here’s the thread where I quoted what someone from ST said to me that one of the engineers said to him… so, yeah… plenty of room for misunderstands here, but…

“There is a Lutron patent that prevents products that haven’t licensed the patent from sending the status of a radio controlled switch when someone physically actuates the device. The Jasco dimmers and switches don’t license the patent so they don’t do that. We’ve worked around this problem in our hub by taking advantage of the fact that these devices do send an association command when you actuate them. When the hub received this command it reads the status of the device (which does not violate the patent) and sends it to the cloud.”

(Here’s the link.)

So it seems the GE/Jasco do send an association command… or at least that’s why the engineer said.

[JDRoberts]

It’s always possible that the support person misunderstood the engineer. Or that the engineer misunderstood the question. Or that the question asked was not the question answered. (A common issue in communications between support and engineers.)

But in any case, you can always go to the Z wave alliance product site and look up the “conformance statement” for any certified zwave device and see exactly which command sets it supports.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the GE/Jasco wall switches support Association. But maybe there’s an individual model that does.

I believe most of the linear switches do support Association, some of the evolution switches do, I think the enerwave wall switches do not and their scene controllers do, but I’m not 100% sure on that. Cooper generally does. There’s just a lot of variation not just from brand to brand, but from model to model within a brand. You just need to check the specs on any individual model you’re interested in.

The engineer may have been explaining to the support person how association can work even when the patent hasn’t been licensed, and the support person then assumed that applied to all switches. Who knows. you can look up the definitive answer on the Z wave alliance product site if you’re really curious.

[chrisb]

Yup, all entirely possible.

But I guess the question I have then is this: If there isn’t some kind of message being sent that the Hub and see and then know to poll the device for it’s current state, how does ST know when a light has been turned on or off? I have pretty much exclusively GE/Jasco switches and run SmartApps that trigger when they are turned on/off.

The app triggers anywhere from less than a second to 5 seconds later. Is the hub just polling all switches that often? (Note that I’m not using pollster on these at all). My understanding was/is that the Hub isn’t polling that fast… and this seems to be confirmed by other examples (ie… when a secondary controller turns on/off a switch it can take a long time – minutes to even hours – before ST notices that it’s changed).

It would seem to me that something has to be signalling that a button press happened and therefore the Hub should investigate.

[bravenel (Bruce)]

First off, you can see all of this in live logging. So fire that up and watch what happens on an individual device. For example, I can see my VRMX1 instant reporting dimmers send the hail() command, which shows in the log as, UNHANDLED COMMAND Hail(). Second, devices do eventually report without a poll. They just don’t do it “instantly” (there are clearly some semantics involved here). So what you are observing as between “less than a second to 5 seconds later” is normal for most switches and dimmers. Sometimes it can be longer, and even 5 seconds is a problem in some circumstances.

[chrisb]

I’ll try to play around with the live logging tonight because I’m very curious how this all works now. It still seems to me that something is going on that triggering the hub to ask the switch for it’s current status… between what the engineer said as well as real world examples… it doesn’t feel like it’s just whenever the node gets around to reporting to the hub.

But just cause it doesn’t feel that way to me doesn’t mean it isn’t, so I’ll try to research more when I can.

[bravenel (Bruce)]

I just tried one of my regular dimmers, and curiously, it sends “Application Busy” immediately when turned off. It didn’t report off until 55 seconds later (which seems incredibly long – but ST has been flaky here this morning).

I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a modified device type that queries the device upon “Application Busy”, to get “instant” reporting out of those dimmers?

[JDRoberts]

Are you sure the “application busy” wasn’t related to repeating a message?

[bravenel (Bruce)]

Pretty sure. It happens with every physical press of the switch – instantly. Nothing else in the logs, nothing else tied to that switch’s on/off. Very interesting!!

[bravenel (Bruce)]

Here is the log entry:

UNHANDLED COMMAND ApplicationBusy(status: 0, waitTime: 0)

[chrisb]

So I tested last night. Hit on… nothing showed up in Live Logging, yes looking at the device it shows the correct status of ‘on’ milliseconds after the button push. I did this with a couple of different GE switches. In every case nothing appears in Live Logging at all.

So… I’m at a loss. Unless the Hub is polling every device nearly instantly (which I’m nearly positive it isn’t), it feels (I hate using that work here, but…) like the switch has to be somehow signalling to the Hub that it was pressed.

I don’t have any other explanation for it otherwise.

[JDRoberts]

@chrisb

I don’t have any other explanation for it otherwise.

Or the live logging feature is broken…

Live Logging totally unreliable lately, we really need better debugging tools

I am trying to work on a device and logging is not working. It took me a while to realize the issue wasn’t with my code but I have a simple action with ONLY a log.debug “action called” line of code. If I press the action tile on my SmartThings apps the debug output happens randomly. If I press it 10 times I may only see output once or twice. We need better debugging !!!