I am suddenly having issues with all of my GE motion dimmers reporting or lack thereof motion events. This started in the last couple of days. Anyone else seeing this? Otherwise z-wave control is functioning properly with these dimmers. Other non GE motion sensors are working as expected.
I am not seeing that. If you are talking the swtich (not the dimmer), try to see if the generic Zwave Motion Switch shows both items. I have noticed even when the interface no longer shows motion, the motion signal is still being processed if you are using it for programmic functions.
It is fine to use the generic driver (DTH) if you want, but you will lose the ability to programmically change the occupancy mode or any of the other settings. This might be a good oppotunity to move over to the DTH Edge driver for this model. Please note, however, that you will no longer be able to use WebCore to access those features like occupancy.
All of this is part of the evalution of SmartThings and the depreciation of Groovy.
I have the dimmers. They were originally not showing motion and I had to follow some of the steps in this thread to try to get the motion detection to work - change occupancy , enable/disable motion, switch to generic device types etc. Eventually I got all of them to work flawlessly. Now suddenly motion detection is sporadic and this includes with the new edge driver which I switched a couple of dimmers over to. 
I wonder if you have a bad device. It does happenā¦
I have 4 of them all with similar behavior. Strangely it seemed to happen after I installed the edge driver. I am nearly certain that is coincidental because I only moved one dimmer over to the edge driver. Setting the dimmer to occupancy mode, it works as expected and turns on the lights. The edge driver also makes it difficult/impossible to change to a generic device type.
Have you run a z-wave repair since moving them over? Your z-wave mesh sees the move to edge as deleting 4 repeaters and adding 4 new ones, so it could be that things arenāt routing optimally and messages are getting dropped.
Yes, I rebooted the hub and ran a z-wave repair twice at this point. Again, all controls via the app and automations are working with those devices and are fairly speedy. They really seem to be exhibiting the same behavior that others experienced in this thread where you had to toggle settings a bunch to get motion to be detected and correctly displayed in the smartthings app. I realize there are other ways like webCore that may not rely on this. I am trying to move all automation to the built-in routines due to the move away from groovy.
Am I understanding correctly that an automation that triggers off the motion event is firing off correctly, but the motion event isnāt displaying in the app detail view or the app event history?
No, there is no motion trigger so the automation is not firing. I was referring to other motion sensors that are triggering these same dimmers in other automations.
@MichaelS I discovered that all my motion dimmers stopped detecting motion around 1pm on Thursday. Very strange.
I tried moving more of them to the edge driver last night with limited success. @philh30 I am seeing motion events but they are slow to trigger, many never trigger, and the reset seems to be way longer than the configured setting of 20 seconds. Very unreliable. This behavior does seem like a mesh issue so I rebooted and repaired a couple of times. On commands sent from the app occur fast. Ugh this is starting to feel like the issues I had with Hubitat that brought me back here. How do I troubleshoot now that the IDE functionality is minimized with edge drivers?
BTW, no matter what I tried with one of the motion dimmers, toggling settings etc, it simply would not detect motion. Finally I tried renaming the device and that got motion sensing going again albeit with the above issues.
I had written everything below before remembering that I did have communication issues with mine at one point. The issue turned out to be that the device seemed (from the ST side) to support network-wide exclusion and inclusion, and I had excluded it and then re-paired it in place. Communication between the device and hub was shoddy after that inclusion, especially for anything coming from the device. The solution was to bring the hub next to the device, exclude it (I may have had to do a general exclusion, and I remember doing the factory reset on the device which I think is ten quick taps on the up button), and then re-include with the hub in close proximity. If you excluded/included at a distance, I would start with a clean re-pair at close range.
I think first thing is to nail down where the point of failure is. If youāre watching for motion events to pop up in the app, then the full chain for the event to get to you is Device => Z-Wave Mesh => ST Hub => ST Cloud => ST App. Thereās definitely lag in those last two steps, and thereās really nothing we can do about it. The device history in particular is terribly laggy.
Easiest thing to knock the app and cloud out of consideration is to set up some routines (the native ST ones) that run local based on motion. Lamp turns on when motion, off when no motion. You should see fairly immediate response if the Device through ST Hub portion of the chain is working efficiently, since everything really is local at that point.
Alternatively, if you have the CLI set up, or are willing to set it up, then the logcat function will definitely narrow things down to the Device through ST Hub portion. The CLI logging shows an entire driver at one time, which will make it tough to isolate one device, so you may want to temporarily divide your switches between my generic GE driver and the one specific to the motion switches so that the switch youāre testing is alone on a driver. Both drivers handle motion events the same - the only difference is whether the key config parameters like occupancy mode show on the detail view. For every motion trip, you should see a burst of log lines posting immediately - an incoming z-wave message followed by an event being posted. If you see both, then everything is being handled properly through the hub, and the issue is cloud/app. If you see z-wave but no event (or an error message), then I need log lines to see why the driver code isnāt handling what your switch is sending. If thereās neither (or both post but slowly or intermittently), then itās the device or mesh. Iād be more inclined to say mesh if itās slow or intermittent, and device if you donāt see anything from the device except in response to a command from the hub.
Iām sure thereās a body of knowledge regarding troubleshooting the device in this thread - Iām a newcomer to these devices and havenāt read through this thread to get caught up to date. If the issue is with the device, then I could see possible benefit in going through the settings and toggling them to a different setting and then back. The driver attempts to send the parameter change every time you toggle it (you donāt have to exit the settings menu anymore). If you have the CLI with logging running, you should see 3 z-wave commands for each parameter toggle - sending the parameter change, sending a request for the device to report the parameter value, and the device sending back the current value for the parameter. Edge doesnāt allow me to update the app settings menu based on the value that the device sends back, so it just shows what you last attempted to set the device to, but seeing that return message in logs would be confirmation that the parameter change worked. For the dedicated motion switch driver, the parameters that show on the detail view ARE updated based on what comes back from the device, and are also queried fresh from the device if you swipe down on the detail screen to trigger a refresh command, so you can trust the values displayed as actually being programmed in the device.
Assuming you confirm that all of the config parameters are actually set how you want them at the device, the other thing that I could see causing problems with device configuration is if you somehow knocked the hub out of association group 1. If that were the issue though, I wouldnāt expect the device to provide ANY updates to the hub unless asked for them. I donāt have association group 1 in the settings specifically so people donāt accidentally mess that up, so I donāt think this would be your issue unless something went wrong during inclusion or you did something crazy.
There really arenāt any tools in ST to troubleshoot the mesh - even less so on Edge right now. The two options for getting serious about investigating your mesh are adding a z-stick to your network (also useful for firmware updates) or using a zniffer to see the commands going to/from a particular device. Those options are going up a few levels in complexity though.
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I tried the above steps after removing and re-joining my GE motion dimmer. However, I am still seeing no motion detected. I confirmed even webcore is not seeing motion. I also tried changing settings such as disabling/enabling the motion sensor.
All of my GE dimmers stopped reporting motion at the same time and then suddenly started reporting again. SmartThings support has been unable to determine why - shocking. Then the other day I did a Z Wave repair and they all stopped reporting motion again. I tried edge drivers with the same result.
I am thinking this must be a z wave mesh issue. However, other motion devices are working flawlessly and on/off events for these dimmers are reporting correctly. One last thing I have noticed, my single GE motion SWITCH is working as expected.
After many days of troubleshooting, I finally found a solution completely by accident. I needed to shut off a circuit breaker and discovered that this suddenly made the motion dimmers on that breaker start sending motion events again. Sure enough a few mains power on/offs later and all of my GE motion dimmers are working again.
Does anyone know if GE/Jasco ever update their firmware. Thereās not much out there that says they do. This is definitely a device anomaly.
Edit: Every Z-Wave Repair now stops all of my GE dimmers from sending motion events and a toggle of the motion sensor setting plus a mains power cycle is necessary to get them operating normally again. Any thoughts @MichaelS ? SmartThings support has pointed out that this is a custom handler and they cannot really help.
Donāt let ST BS youā¦this probably has nothing to do with the handler. To test that theory, use a generic DTH and do a repair. I do question why you do so many repairsā¦I have done one in the past 3 years and it really wasnāt needed. A normal running mesh (with no changes to it) should not need a repair. From your previous post where turning off the breaker āresetā the switch my bet is you have a weak spot in your mesh. To test this, if possible, move your hub via network cable to different areas and see if you get different results
The devices in question are vary from a couple feet away and at the other end of the house. All having the same exact behavior. The many repairs have been because of all of the removing and adding I have done to troubleshoot these devices and to discover any ghost devices in the event that that was part of the issue. I do have some non-plus z wave devices which I am slowly replacing too soā¦
I agree once stable I should not have to repair. I just did a pretty major migration back from Hubitat.
Just curiousā¦Hubitat not what it is cracked up to be? I am in the final stages of moving to Home Assistant and couldnāt be happierā¦it IS a hackerās paradise, but it has about 200x more integrations than ST and works great. That being said, my ST hub is used now JUST as a radio for ZigBee and Z-Waveā¦all automations are through HAā¦I even dumped WebCore. The GE switches are going to be paired with a ZWave stick, giving me the same home experience (occupancy and vacant settings) as with ST without having to write a DTH. Was even able to get virtual switches into HA and have Alexa see them.
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Hubitat was awesome with speedy response timesā¦ Until I got almost all of my devices migrated and lots of automations going. I had all sorts of issues - automations failing to trigger or saying they triggered but nothing happened, highly delayed execution, and I found myself constantly troubleshooting mesh issues. All things you will find reported on the hubitat community with suggestions indicating I may need to run multiple hubs to separate things out. No thanks. It became so unstable and sucked up a ton of time to keep going that I came back to ST. Fingers crossed that the move to edge and more local execution doesnāt overwhelm the ST hub.
I do still have some devices on Hubitat that do not have integrations with ST.
HA I tried a while back before Hubitat. It seemed like Hubitat was a nice in-between HA and ST with more customization than ST and not as much of a hassle to maintain as HA.
It sounds like the denominator in your home are mesh issuesā¦or interferences. Have you looked at repeaters or putting additional devices in? I have close to 100 devices and it was only after getting a lot that everything began running flawlessly.
I easily have over 100 and since it was suggested with Hubitat I got rid of almost all of my non-plus devices. I literally have almost every single switch in my house as a z wave switch so coverage cannot be a problem. I did just invest in a z wave Toolbox to do some testing. Things have been very good on ST.
The only issue I have is with the GE motion dimmers. I cannot see how ALL 6 of them that I have in my house suddenly stop reporting motion events. I am going to stop doing repairs now that things are stable. I mostly just wanted to report here in case others have issues (like above) getting motion to report. Same issue btw with @philh30 edge driver although that one has not been resolved with power resets.
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That kind of rules out the DTH if the edge drivers show the same behavior. For giggles, if it was meā¦I would swap one of them out for a brand new oneā¦this might have later firmware and if behavior changes it COULD be something with the devicesā¦just sayingā¦it sounds like you have narrowed it down a bit to the devices themselves.