Over the last year I have been trying to move away from custom devices (Konnected, ST_Anything, etc) for as much stuff as I can over to “standard” Z-Wave and ZigBee devices. As of right now everything other then my Ecobee and some GE Fan controllers are moved and connected locally.
So now I want to bring in my Kiddie Smoke & CO relays along with 4 glass breakage sensors and a heater status. I bought 7 EcoLink Z-Wave plus tilt sensors that have external inputs and hooked them up to the physical sensors. They work as expected, triggering smoke/co/glass/heater running shows the contact closing. But the issue is I can’t “use” those sensors in SHM as smoke or CO since they come up as standard contacts. Also when they are open, which they always are, they show up in the app as left open. This is a issue because we have a lot of window sensors and we do want to quickly know if a contact is open or not. So when the heater isn’t running that’s “normal” and I don’t want to see “Garage Heater Open” in the list.
In the past I would just modify the standard DTH and make one for Smoke and one for CO. Then redo the tilt/contact sensor and reverse the open/close so when the glass breakage actually closes it shows as open. However I have not kept up with the new Edge driver stuff and it seems pointless to do it in groovy now.
What are my options? I’m thinking for the glass breakage I need a way to reverse the open/close physically which if I can’t do on the sensors I’ll put a small relay inline to reverse the output going to the EcoLink contact (so it “opens” on glass breakage) and then I will use it like a window for SHM. But I’m stuck on the Smoke and CO and the heater status. (is there a way to exclude the heater status from that contact left open list?)
If you mount you Ecolink horizontally (like on a ceiling) and then connect you normally closed inputs they will be in the normally closed state.
If you have a ST hub. For smoke detectors or water detectors create virtual smoke detectors or water detector using @TAustin or @ygerlovin Virtual Edge drivers. Then use automations to link them to your Ecolink. Everything will be local.
I actually bent the sensor forward and down so I could mount them vertically on a wall but still have then think they were opened. Problem is they are normally open sensors so I have to reverse that.
Thats what I kinda figured I might have to do. The problem is they still show up as contact sensors so when they are open they still show in the “stuff that is left open” list.
I’d say this is still the eventual solution you want to shoot for, though it would be best to lump it all into a single driver (we’re capped at 50 drivers installed on a hub). I’m using a Zooz ZEN51 with my smoke relay and wrote a driver for it to masquerade as a smoke.
Ok, so for smoke & co set them up NC then create the virtual smoke & co to reverse them and add to SHM? If so that might work.
I suppose I could do the same with the glass breakage and heater status if I can wire those up NC. Otherwise I’ll need some in between relays to reverse them. Also probably don’t want to use contact as their type to not show up in the list of open sensors. Thats the main issue with those.
Yeah, looking at that now. Gonna figure out the NC issue first as that’s a big annoyance right now then once that’s fixed I’ll look into virtuals. Thanks for the suggestion.
You need custom driver that will have Normally Open/Normally Closed settings, and also a couple of different profiles for smoke/breakage/etc. Similar approach is done with virtual devices that work with Alexa.
Maybe @Mariano_Colmenarejo can help with this?