Physical Contact with switch on webcore

[dseg (Dan)]

I’m using webcore and was wondering if there is anyway to setup a rule that says if a switch is manually touched, then do this.
The logic seems to only be on and off but a rule or action could turn it on but I need it do different things if I manually turn it on.

[nathancu (Nathan Curtis)]

ST as a platform doesn’t support it anymore. For quite a few years now actually. It USED to and you’ll find vestigial artifacts of it in WebCoRE, but in short, the vendor support was so flaky that when it did work it was buggy - so they just sunset it. So now, while some hardware does have the capability to ID a physical v. programmatic press - the platform doesn’t support it. Maybe that will change in the future…

[JDRoberts]

Some switches do not report when they are toggled physically and in other cases if you polled the switch and it sent back a result then that looked like it was toggled physically, and in still other cases a repeater might end up forwarding the toggled message in such a way that it looked like a network command. Plus the issue of 3 way switches where physically toggling the accessory switch results in a network command to the master switch.

So you put all that together and it just ended up being something that couldn’t be relied on.

Here’s a really old thread about it:

Erroneous isPhysical() event (Zwave DTH)

We haven’t really been using isPhysical, because it’s not always possible to tell in the DTH. Z-Wave Switch uses a kind of hackish trick, it send a different kind of get when polling vs when actuating so it can tell if the incoming report was from a poll (whether dth or hub-based) which indicates a physical event. Remember that very few Z-Wave switches actually send us a report when they are toggled – we have to rely on polling and watching for node info broadcasts. The physical event tracking was taken out of Dimmer Switch in this commit, accidentally I assume: https://github.com/SmartThingsCommunity/SmartThingsPublic/commit/9d016839 Personally I think we should drop it all together because it’s not consistent.