Monoprice - no logo z-wave products - work? 15% off now

Devices & Integrations
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Monoprice - no logo z-wave products - work?
any quality issues or difficulty connecting?

can anyone verify these work:
http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_id=122&cp_id=12212&cs_id=1221201

i am looking at the motion detector w/ temperature sensor
light dimmer or plugin on/off
curtain modules == too cheap to be true, no experience with this, saw prices on curtains and put it out of mind. any advice?

and if you have experience, if there are any known issues/hassles/or easy plug/play like other devices, i would super appreciate it! :grin:

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I have two of the motions. They work reliably. Only issue is battery reporting doesnā€™t work and motion is a 5 min timeout until no motion.

I would recommend PEQ available at best buy. I have their motion and it is identical to the 2nd Gen ST motion. Temp, Battery, only a few second motion time out. The PEQ motion is $24.99.

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u rock

easy install?

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The easiest. Pairs as a smart sense motion. No custom device type needed.

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and i have had a best buy $100 gift card burning a hole in my pocket for months, any other good stuff they have? smart home wise?

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They carry Hue and some other assorted stuff.

Iā€™ve only tried the PEQ motion, contact and water sensor. Very happy with all three. See this thread and donā€™t believe the best buy.com price for PEQ.

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did you have to price match? its 39.99

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nope. check that thread. .com price isnā€™t accurate to the store prices a lot of community members are seeing.

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Most Best Buy seem to have the peq sensors on sale in store right now, but they are not on sale online. Lots of community members have them. They are not officially supported, but most of the sensors work as generic devices. No custom code required. I have two of the contact sensors and one of the motion sensors. Note that other devices like the cameras, thermostat, etc. will not necessarily work with smartthings. But most of the sensors are rebrands of a different brand which does work with SmartThings.

Much discussion in the topic @greg linked to:

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hate living in rural place

This item is not available near the ZIP code you entered

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Regarding the Mono price, thatā€™s a well-known very inexpensive brand. With inexpensive engineering. They usually work okay, if you get a defective one, just return it, donā€™t hassle trying to make it work.

Iā€™m not sure, but I suspect the line may be on sale right now because they may have a line coming out for the new standard, Zwave plus. A lot of device manufacturers have new devices coming out in 2015 for this reason. Everything is backwards compatible, you wonā€™t have to replace the devices you have, but Zwave plus does have a bigger range, which a lot of people like. So demand will eventually shift over to those.

http://z-wave.sigmadesigns.com/z-wave_plus

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the only advantage is farther distance?

wondering if i would even need that, maybe good time to take advantage of older stuff on saleā€¦

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Ok, you canā€™t tell if youā€™ll get the $99 price for the following until you get in the store, because itā€™s an unadvertised sale, and not all Best Buy stores are doing it. And itā€™s not available online.

But, if your store happens to have the harmony home hub with a remote on sale at that price, itā€™s definitely worth considering.

This is a very nice universal remote which has limited but useful integration with smartthings. Once you have it set up, you can use one button on the remote to control some of your audiovisual equipment plus some of your smartthings controlled devices. The most common use is for a ā€œmovieā€ activity where pressing the button, turns on The TV and dims the lights. But there are also four toggle buttons (only four) that let you toggle lights or other devices on and off from the TV remote.

If you have high expectations for this, you will be very disappointed. But if you have low expectations, like just the ability to turn a light or two on and off, or the ability to combine a light and the TV on one button, you may be pretty happy.

My housemate bought this a couple of weeks ago because he wanted a universal remote and it said smartthings integration on the box. I hoped that meant full smartthings integration so I could start controlling audiovisual devices through smartthings, but that is not currently available. But we do have the ability to have a couple of the TV remote buttons toggle some of the smartthings devices. And thatā€™s what he wanted and we really like it as a universal remote anyway so for us that would be a really good way to spend a $100 Best Buy gift card. :wink:

On the other hand,if your Best Buy has it at the more typical price of $130, you might not want it. So just a thought. Also, the only model that this works with right now is the ā€œHarmony homeā€ not anything with ā€œultimateā€ in the name. So not the ones with the touchscreens.

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There are some really significant improvements at the chip level in zwave plus that will allow for more sophisticated devices in the future.

If you got two very similar devices, like a water sensor, and one was z wave and one was zwave plus, The two biggest improvements you would see from a consumer standpoint would be a longer range and improved battery life. Whether thatā€™s worth a higher cost to you just depends on your use cases.

http://www.vesternet.com/us/what-is-z-wave-plus

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Note that these products come with very little documentation, they are Ok if you want the most basic of functions. I bought an in-wall switch that kind of works except that it does not report the switch state back when physically toggled. Support wasnā€™t of much help. I noticed that there was at least one other review for a motion sensor product with a similar issue. Thereā€™s just not enough documentation on configuration parameters and you might run into issues quickly.

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I can verify that the monoprice motion sensor works fine, and all functions seem to be present - motion, temperature, battery and tamper alerts. You can absolutely configure the default 5 minute motion timeout as low as one minute.

The trick - install & self-publish Florianzā€™ device handler for the Monoprice Motion and after pairing, find the device under My Devices in the IDE, edit it, and switch the handler to the newly installed one. After this youā€™ll want to exit the ST app, then force-quit it. Re-launch the app, and under My Things, if you tap the gear in the upper right of the motion sensor tile, you can access the preferences tile where you can set the timeout.

Florianzā€™ device type handlers can be found on his github: https://github.com/FlorianZ/SmartDevices

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thanks surfous! I was already on florianz device type but never saw the inactivity timeout preference. Are you getting a value anything other than 100% for battery though? I never have so I thought battery wasnā€™t working right.

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@greg, I have not seen a value other than 100% Mine is new enough that it was within the realm of possibility that the battery was just sooooper fresh!

Iā€™ve done some looking. I also have a Monoprice garage door sensor, an Ecolink contact sensor and two Aeon hidden door sensors. All read 100% in the ST app. This seems less likely true unless the sleeping devices are just ridiculously efficient and all the batteries were plucked straight from the vine. The Aeon sensors are allegedly sending battery reports at 100% according to the event logs, so thereā€™s that.

Iā€™ll have to put the proverbial stethoscope on this and make sure the Ecolink and Monoprice handlers are indeed requesting and handling Battery commands. Iā€™ve got no qualms about getting my hands in device handler code. :wink:

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@greg, I have an update here.

First, my Aeon sensors seem to be reporting battery every 12 hours, and indeed, they are reporting 100% battery. I guess itā€™s possibly that thereā€™s a physical problem with both of them, but Iā€™m inclined to just say that they are measuring Y mAH on the cell and they consider X mAH to be 100%, but Y > X at present because new battery, higher capacity battery than spec, etc., so itā€™s gonna report 100% until Y falls below X and onto the scale that Aeon has calibrated for the device.

Now, the monoprice motion sensorā€¦ Iā€™m just climbing out of the rabbit hole here. First, it looks like Florianz code should be checking battery daily. It also is logging an event when it issues the command and when it handles the report. I saw neither event in my historical event logs for the device for days (yes, I checked all events).

From this, I knew that something was wrong, but I canā€™t say what. So, I did what any software engineer would do, and rewrote the device handler until it worked. :yum:

But holy crapā€¦ So, this was the first sleepy device Iā€™ve gotten personal with. I understand the different paradigm, but itā€™s a whole lot heavier on the responses from parse, and the documentation and examples around thisā€¦ well, many are plain wrong, with wrong defined as ā€˜doesnā€™t workā€™. I think there are things that did work that now donā€™t or things that are supposed to work but donā€™t yet.

I have more testing to do to find out the current state of issuing commands and events in response to a device event out of parse. Right now, my rough guidance is:

  • Returning a single response-wrapped-command from parse works.
  • Returning a list of individually wrapped commands and wrapped delays works.
  • Returning a list of individually wrapped commands and un-wrapped delays fails silently
  • Returning a list of commands and delays that has been wrapped as a unit fails (this is the example in documentation)

hardly exhaustive, but my goal so far was finding what worked for the case at hand. Iā€™ll try to perform more tests and write up results.

On the WakeUpNoMoreInformation command - Iā€™m not sure of itā€™s exact effect yet, or if thereā€™s a race condition to be concerned about. Certainly, if the NMI arrives at the device before my last command to it, then my last command is SOL. But what if all my commands have hit the device, but all reports havenā€™t yet been sent when the NMI command arrives at the device? Does it preempt pending reports?

I still need to investigate identical fingerprints (the device pairs as an Aeon Multisensor at inclusion. But this precludes me from doing anything clever at that time, so the end user experience is still to switch the handler on the device - less than ideal.

Anyway, at least I have something at the moment that is working. Iā€™m hoping to button it up enough today to get into the wild.

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