Aeotec MultiSensor 5 Battery Status

Hey,

My AeoTec MultiSensors have been notoriously bad at battery life, at least as far as
they report their own battery status, so as HAL might advise, I'm leaving them in till they fail.

The battery status has shown 0 now for over two weeks and it's still working fine.
This is a highly used sensor in our master bath that does a lot of reporting sending humidity,
light and temps frequently.

Just thought I'd put it out there that you may be wasting batteries on it.

Carl

This may be because Indigo will show battery devices sending low battery reports as having 0% battery.
So if the device start sending low battery reports at for example 20% battery level, Indigo will drop the battery level from 20% to 0%.
I have implemented both report types in the ZEAL plugin to be able to distuinguish.
For example, I have a couple Aeotec ZW100 multisensors that has a configurable level for when it starts sending out low battery reports. If I configure this level to 50%, Indigo will drop the displayed battery level to 0% when the low battery report is received, while the battery level actually is 50%.

It is the same Z-wave command received for battery level and low battery (0-100 for battery level, 255 for low battery), that may be why it is this way in Indigo. I personally don't think is the best way to handle it, don't know if Matt/Jay has any plans to change this.

Thanks Krissh. Good to know.
Have to give your plugin a try.

Carl

[matt (support)]

You are correct that Indigo is currently setting the level to 0% when it receives the battery low (value of 255) command. I believe I'm going to modify this now so that it instead changes the level to 5%. That might be a bit misleading in some cases, but I think showing a really low level (5%) would be more accurate than showing it is completely drained (0%).

I for one find it better if you would consider not changing the battery level at all when receiving low battery reports, and rather consider making just a log event or similar. For example my Aeotec ZW100s will, when reporting low battery also send periodical battery level reports. If set to send low battery at 20%, that causes the Indigo displayed battery level to change back and forth from 0 to 20%, which might cause unexpected behavior in triggers etc. For my ZW100s the low battery report is sent approximately every hour I believe, the battery level reported with a few hours between each report.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[matt (support)]

I agree that having an additional boolean state (batteryLow) would be the best approach. For now (next bug fix release) I'm just going to improve it by changing the percentage used from 0% to 5%. That doesn't avoid the problem cases you mentioned, but given there is only a single batteryLevel state right now I think using a constant 5% is an improvement over using 0% when the low battery command is received.

I'll also put adding the additional device state on to the feature request list.

[matt (support)]

Indigo 7.1.1 is now available for download and has the above described change.