[RELEASE] Zooz 4-in-1 Sensor

So all the numbers are showing up how they are supposed to I think. The gray is normal for things like battery life, RH, temperature, etc. The log has numbers too, so I think all those things are working right.

IIRC tapping the tamper event didn’t do anything for me. I turned on the option to automatically clear it – this turns it on while the case is open and will turn it off automatically once the case is closed.

This seems like the only thing that might be behaving incorrectly. During the snippet of time you showed in the screen shots were there any motion events that should have been picked up? If not then try this:

  1. Make sure your motion re-trigger is set to 1 in settings.
  2. Make sure you have no outstanding configuration changes to be sent (more on that later)
  3. make sure the device is somewhere you have good control over when/if it will see any motion, like pointed toward a wall, etc. This prevents accidentally triggering motion while you’re trying to figure out if it’s working.
  4. make sure the device shows no motion, and isn’t in a state where it’s not sending additional motion signals (ie, it very recently did detect motion).
  5. hell, pull the batteries and pop them back in to restart it if you want. Doubt this matters but it’s nice if you’re superstitious
  6. open up the web api log and also have another tab open to the device’s configuration page (eg, go to “my devices” and click the name of the device; it’ll show a page with a bunch of stuff and also a list of all the current state values. double check that motion is inactive.)
  7. move your hand or whatever where the sensor will capture the motion

Refresh the device configuration page (NOT the log page) and see if it registers motion as active. This is pretty much the raw data and best way to figure out if it’s actually registering correctly and it’s a display issue or if the motion event is actually not showing up. If not give it a few seconds more and refresh again. These sensors are not very quick to report motion so don’t be surprised if it stays inactive for a few seconds.

If the value there is correct you’ve at least isolated that the DH is working correctly processing the events but for some reason the app is not displaying the information correctly.

ALSO! The background of the top, big tile is misleading! That will not do anything special if motion is detected. You will see “active” instead of “inactive” in the secondary information, and the “No Motion” tile will change to “Motion”.

You can do the above steps with the tamper trigger too (might want to try that first actually since it’s easier to set and reset – I’d recommend setting the ‘automatically clear tamper event’ setting at least temporarily while you do so).

This is normal too and maybe he should remove the refresh button because it’s kinda misleading. Some devices I have a refresh tap will near-instantly contact the device and update everything. That’s not how this device works (I do not think it’s the handler, but how the device proper works).

If you tap refresh once the next time the device checks in it will ask and retrieve all the values. Checkins are about once every 6 hours or more though! They are not any time an event happens (which is also how some of my other devices work). So even though you might see new readings coming in, the refresh is still sitting there waiting for the device to actually check in.

If you tap refresh twice, it will get the values AND re-send all the configuration values to the device. Again, you have to wait for the next checkin which is likely in hours. You have probably done this and that’s why it says there are 7 changes pending – it’s waiting for that next checkin to send over all your configuration (it doesn’t mean they are actually different than the device’s current configuration since you probably forced the update by tapping refresh twice. So your settings might actually be correct.)

You CAN easily force a refresh by pushing a pin/paperclip to tap the pair button. Give it ~1 minute and you should see that the “7 Changes Pending” goes away. If not, try again. It’s weird but sometimes it doesn’t actually trigger a checkin (but it does work much more often than it doesn’t).

It’s also possible your device doesn’t have the updated settings so it’s still on slow refreshes, etc. I’d recommend forcing the checkin until you see there are no changes pending. And in the mean time DO NOT hit the refresh button :slight_smile:

I have noticed that sometimes the displayed values lag behind slightly. I think this is a ST thing – the DH is updating the numbers but for some reason the app is still showing the older values. If the numbers are showing correctly in the log then the DH is setting the value correctly.

Going back/forth sometimes clears this for me. I’ll even sometimes see the correct number in some places and the wrong number elsewhere, etc.

The temperature tile is the only tile that always has color. Someone else posted a screenshot of the changes they made to the UI which might be causing some confusion. I originally tried using colors for light and humidity, but you can’t control the text color and it was sometimes hard to read the values.

The motion tile should be blue while it says “Motion” and the tamper tile should be red when it says tamper.

If you want the large tile at the top to change color when there’s motion you have to set the “Primary Status” setting to “Motion”.

If you’re using an Android device then that “finger frag down on screen” action doesn’t do anything because the SmartThings mobile app doesn’t support it.

I’ve found that larger DTHs like this one often cause caching issues in the SmartThings mobile app and you sometimes have to go back to the Things screen and re-open the device to see the changes.

You can test that by checking the IDE which @eviljim explained how to do.

Tap the refresh button to clear the tamper message.

If tamper is not active, the refresh tile sets a flag indicating that it should retrieve all values from the device the next time it wakes up.

Tapping it a second time clears the internally stored settings which forces them to get resent to the device the next time it wakes up. This is only necessary if they get out of sync which shouldn’t happen unless you switch to a different DTH and then come back.

Most battery powered devices sleep so the DTH can’t send it commands until it wakes up.

I know he said he’s using the Monoprice device, but the latest version of the Zooz 4-in-1 sensor only accepts 15-60 for the re-trigger interval so those users shouldn’t try setting it to 1.

The behavior of the top tile is determined by the “Primary Status” setting.

I probably should change that tile at the bottom to say something like “Refresh Pending” or something the first time the tile is tapped to make it less confusing.

The refresh tile also clears the tamper flag if you don’t have it set to auto clear.

This device sleeps so you can only send it commands when it wakes up which is why nothing happens immediately when you tap the refresh tile.

I’m not sure about iOS, but that problem started about 5-6 months ago with the Android app. Going into the application management section of your phone’s settings and clearing the data for the SmartThings app usually helps for a few days, but you’ll have to log back into the mobile app.

Kevin & Jim, thank you both for your inputs, both have been very helpful. As I thought, I think most of this is down to my understanding & user error.
I did add a smartapp for motion on top of this so I get a notification of motion, this works fine, so I think the sensor is feeding out signals.
Kevin, the refresh tile never responds to touch, it is always light grey & has no reaction to being tapped at all. Same for the tamper & motion tiles, they are always light grey, even during an event & only show a colour change momentarily when I finger swipe down the screen - iOS devices, no Android.
Motion is actually a tertiary function for me in my application here, I wanted temperature & humidity more, but I kind of like this little thing & the handler, so I am thinking of one or two more spots to put them & use this code that Kevin has put together (thanks again by the way!). These may have motion as a higher importance to me when I get to them, but overall this seems to do most of what I was hoping for.
So now that I have learned from you, it seems like the only thing that is possibly still slightly off is the refresh tile not reacting to taps, regardless of changes pending or not. But for the most part I think it is all OK for my personal use right now - I am not going for many sophisticated options (yet…).
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, it is greatly appreciated! Hopefully I can pass on the karma within my field of knowledge some day.

If you open the device and it shows the tamper message and you tap refresh and it goes away, then it’s working…

If you tap the refresh tile twice and the bottom tile displays pending changes, then that’s working too…

Yep, once I had played with the handler a little more I realized that. What made me confused I think is I had my primary set to temperature but the background image behind the temperature reading was still the little left/right motion sensor icon. So I sort of thought it might still do something related to the motion sensor.

If possible it might make it more obvious if that icon changed based on what was selected (not sure if you can update the tiles dynamically though?)

st.alarm.temperature.normal would be good for temperature
st.Weather.weather12 maybe for humidity?
st.illuminance.illuminance.bright for light % or lux

I tried tapping the refresh tile & paid attention more & it did give a 7 changes pending update onto the screen right afterwards so maybe I am just not really ‘clicking’ in my head that something happened.

Anyway, bottom line, I am more educated & happy, so thanks to Kevin for creating & educating me (and Jim) and to Jim for additional input & things to try.

I think I may just pick up a couple more of the Monoprice ones to play around the house with for fun, they are cheap enough :slight_smile:

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To filemaker8 .com:

Thank you for the donation, but I can’t respond to your questions/comments because you didn’t include your email address or ST handle…

So after a few weeks of use, 2 sensors - this is still a problematic sensor. It reports relative humidity very often, but then it will not report light change (from dark, 1.5% to super bright room, 90%) for 15+ minutes. And in those 15 minutes, it reports temperature and RH change. Light reporting trigger is set to it’s minimum of 5% in the DTH settings .Both sensor have this problem. Sometimes it reports within couple minutes though. @TheSmartestHouse if you see this, please provide suggestion. May be the device handle has an issue, who knows.

Hi Simon,
The only part of the device that it supposed to work as a trigger is motion. All other values, like humidity, temperature, and light are all for monitoring purposes and so they need to be polled to return values. If you’d like to use the light sensor as a trigger, we recommend going with the ZSE09 Mini Sensor which reports light change right away and can be used as a secondary trigger to automate lighting.

Thanks for the quick reply (on Sunday :slight_smile: ). Quick update about this issue - this morning it took it 30 minutes to update the light change (from 1.5% to 100%). Meanwhile, there was multiple temperature, humidity and MOTION updates in the “Recent” tap of the device handler. The sensor in the other room updated within minutes.

Now on what you said - it doesn’t make any sense. Why there is setting in the DTH for triggering value of temperature, humidity and light in the Device Type Handler? I don’t need to trigger live, like the motion does, and that is probably what you meant. Just need the light change report to work like the temp and humidity. 3-5 minutes will be good enough for me. I will continue invigilating as it’s only the third day I am debugging a light based scene.

Hi Simon,

If you look in the manual, the settings refer to “reporting threshold” not trigger. This is adjustable in case you don’t need any of the functionality. For example, if you don’t care about humidity readings, you can set the threshold to 50% and the sensor will not send a signal back to controller unless humidity changes by more than 50%. This helps conserve battery life. Technically, temperature, humidity, and light sensors should work the same way. But if for example the light sensor is last in the queue, the report may not go through because a different command (like an alarm or notification) will be prioritized by the hub and the reading from light sensor may not be reported together with the other values.

We haven’t heard of any particular issues with the light sensor (other than it reporting % instead of LUX which affects automations) so we’ll do some testing on our end as well to see if we can get to the bottom of this.

SmartThings must have changed something a couple of months ago because I’ve been running into a lot of problems with commands getting dropped so you might be right.

I’ll also do some testing to make sure there isn’t a problem with my DTH.

You should be able to easily test TheSmartHouse’s theory by temporarily changing the temp and humidity triggers to their highest values.

Make sure you wake the device up after changing the settings by using the paperclip to push the recessed button on the bottom of the device.

The device doesn’t always wake up the first time and the configuration change commands often get dropped so if the bottom tile still shows pending changes after 30 seconds you’ll need to wake it up again.

I wrote a SmartApp that allows you to select devices and event types and it logs those events to Google Sheets. SmartThings deletes the event history after 7 days so it’s a way to keep the history long term and it’s useful for troubleshooting because you can filter the data and create pivot tables.

If you think you might be interested in that SmartApp, search the forum for Simple Event Logger.

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What could be wrong with the DTH is humidity trigger point - I had mine set up at 5% (minimum is 1%) and I can see humidity reported way more often than anything else. Changes are even less than 0.5% (38.78 and 39.01 for example). Everything else for me is set to minimum (highest sensitivity) as I want the temperature changes and light reported as often as possible.

I am already using is and kudos for your work. I will make a new instance to log these 2 sensors specifically.

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I just analyzed my logged event data from the last couple of days and I found 2 things that could be causing the small changes in humidity to get reported.

Every time you tap the refresh button it forces the device to request all 3 sensor values the next time the device wakes up and I’m guessing that you might have pressed that a few times while trying to get the light level to report more often.

The other possible reason is that any time the temperature, humidity, or light threshold is exceeded the device automatically reports all 3 values. If the reported value matches the device’s current value then that event won’t be displayed on the Recently tab. If you open the device in the IDE and click the “List Events” link you’ll see every event that was reported.

I need to do additional testing on the frequency of the light level reporting because I forgot to move the sensor and it was in a room that has blackout curtains and rarely has a light on for more than a couple of minutes.

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I was not tapping refresh button. So basically if one of the 3 parameters change, all 3 are reported. What about motion - if motion is detected, will the other 3 be reported as well?

Example: If you have humidity set to 10 and the humidity changes by 10% or more, the device will report temperature, humidity, and light.

no

So this means I will be able to use rechargeable CR123a lithium ion batteries? Sign me up! Any more details on this release?

Hi Jared, as long as the battery charges to full 3V, then yes, you’ll be able to use it!
We’ll be reviewing a final sample in the next few days and expect the new version to arrive in around 4 weeks from now. We’ll post a link to the product here once it’s released. Just look for VER. 2.0 next to ZSE40 :slight_smile:
Let us know if you have any other questions!

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Rechargeable cr123a is 3.6 volts I believe. Hopefully it is able to handle that voltage, these batteries are pretty interchangeable in the flashlight community. The only reason I have not been expanding on my motion sensors is because most of them either use expensive batteries (like the Iris one), or are too expensive outright.

I’m also eyeing that new homeseer motion sensor as it also uses these batteries in addition to accepting wired power.