I have an outdoor motion sensor that requires the switch to be cycled on/off twice in order to override the motion sensor and keep the light on indefinitely. I have tried using Webcore and the Flasher II app, but they seem to send the command erratically, I’m guessing due to them being executed in the cloud.
I can make this work using the Smartthings Classic App (click the light on/off manually), so I’m wondering if a locally executed solution would work. I don’t see a way to turn a switch on/off repeatedly with Smart Lighting.
Does anyone have any idea how to achieve this? From reading other threads, I believe that Eaton/Cooper makes a Z-Wave switch that natively supports “blinking,” but I’d like to keep my existing GE switches if possible.
This is one of those things that just depends a great deal on the local mesh, and reliability can even vary from day to day. We wouldn’t ordinarily do it with a mesh protocol at all if we wanted to get consistent results. Whether it’s cloud or local. Mesh protocols do not enforce sequencing by definition, Messages can and do bounce around the network depending on the route chosen for anyone transaction.
This is why the SmartThings developer docs have always said that intervals of less than a minute can’t guarantee performance. You can try it and see if it works for you, but it may not.
You’ll see that almost all of the Z wave device manufacturers No longer try to do double tap as single individual commands sent over the mesh. Instead, they capture the pattern at the device itself and then send different scene codes based on the pattern that was recognized.
The alternative is to use a Wi-Fi switch instead. Because that’s not a mesh network, there is a forced sequence on events, so it’s easier to get multi tap patterns.
I’m not sure which if any of the Wi-Fi switches run locally, because you would want to try to avoid a cloud if possible.
Otherwise, just find a Wi-Fi outlet that you can program with its own app and then trigger that routine with a virtual switch through a cloud integration to smart things. So you are only turning on the virtual switch once, but that is triggering the on/off pattern on the Wi-Fi switch.
I just don’t know what specific brands would work for that.
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I’m coming to the same conclusion. In my rudimentary testing, clicking the switch directly in the app is fast enough to be reliable under most circumstances, but I’m sure it would fail at times.
I think my best hope is to replace the switch with one like the Eaton/Cooper Aspire that has a built in blink/flash command. Anyone know of any other switches that support that functionality? I can’t really use an outlet because the motion light is wired to a wall switch.
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