Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Posted on
Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:58 am
kpfriedberg offline

Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

I know that we have discussed this in the past, and the standard response is 'line noise', but i am asking if there could be another culprit.

So with many action groups/scenes, there are devices which often, as part of the scene or trigger get the 'send failed (no acknowledgement" error. I have filterlincs all over the house and have worked on the signal noise thing quite a bit. What i have noticed is that almost all these instances are with 600W insteon modules that are physically located in boxes with more than one module (and typically, but not always in the middle. So the middle module in a box with 3 modules). Could it be because the higher wattage module is required? I recall reading that if you have a box with multiple switches, you require higher wattage modules because of the proximity/interaction of the modules. Could this be the culprit?

Posted on
Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:08 pm
matt (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 21411
Joined: Jan 27, 2003
Location: Texas

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Interesting theory. Is it normally failing after one or more of the 3 modules has been on a while? I wonder if the receiving reliability of the module is dropping because it is getting too hot.

Image

Posted on
Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:51 pm
kpfriedberg offline

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

support wrote:
Interesting theory. Is it normally failing after one or more of the 3 modules has been on a while? I wonder if the receiving reliability of the module is dropping because it is getting too hot.


don't believe so, but i do notice that modules that are in a multi-gang box run hotter than individually located modules...

Posted on
Sun May 02, 2010 9:40 pm
dshj offline
User avatar
Posts: 84
Joined: Jan 16, 2010
Location: San Francisco, CA

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Related to this, is there any way to get Indigo to continue to request the status of the device and continue to resend until it receives an acknowledgement? Maybe this could be a variable that I set, retry until you hit the 20th attempt? I obviously don't want to repeat indefinitely, but I wish Indigo would continue to retry after its initial attempt. When I manually retry from a control page, it responds right away, and I have no reason to believe this is line noise.

Any thoughts? Or am I looking in the wrong place?

Posted on
Sun May 02, 2010 9:58 pm
jay (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 18199
Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

dshj wrote:
When I manually retry from a control page, it responds right away, and I have no reason to believe this is line noise.


And do you do the retry within seconds of the failure? Signal noise is often inconsistent, so a minute or two could make a difference between a command working and one not. Also, signal collisions can also cause failures (too many commands trying to be executed at the same time).

The INSTEON protocol already has retries built-in so Indigo doesn't currently add anything on top of that.

Jay (Indigo Support)
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Posted on
Sun May 02, 2010 10:47 pm
dshj offline
User avatar
Posts: 84
Joined: Jan 16, 2010
Location: San Francisco, CA

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

I'll retry within seconds, and it works just fine.

I do run into problems on occasion with collisions, but I understand when that's happening.

I guess I could write a script that queries the status of the device and then attempts to resend until the correct status is returned, but I didn't know if Indigo had something like this built-in already. I know INSTEON repeats three times.

One possibility on this specific case is that it's a collision between the receipt of the signal from the motion sensor and the signal to activate the light. From the control page, I can clearly see that the sensor detected motion, but the light doesn't respond to the "on" command. Odd...

I thought I remembered seeing something in the Indigo setup that asks about repeating the signal. Am I mistaken?

Posted on
Mon May 03, 2010 5:54 am
jay (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 18199
Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

There is nothing built-in to do extra retries or repeating signals. The collision with the motion sensor makes sense, particularly on a circuit that might already have some line noise (thus multiple retries with longer hop counts). You could try adding a slight delay to the action, say starting with 0.3 seconds (and increasing to see if that makes it more consistent) - that might give the MS's ACK time to process before the signal is sent to turn on the light. Of course, since this is a motion activated light you might not want the delay - OTOH, if it makes it work consistently then it is better than what it's doing now.

Jay (Indigo Support)
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Posted on
Wed Feb 08, 2012 6:27 pm
nsheldon offline
Posts: 2469
Joined: Aug 09, 2010
Location: CA

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Just as another data point, I've consistently encountered this exact same problem with a nearly exact same setup. I have a hallway motion sensor that triggers (through Indigo) an ON signal being sent to the hallway light. The hallway light switch (a SwitchLinc Dimmer, 600W) is in s 3-gang box, all of which are 600W SwitchLinc Dimmers. When the trigger is manually executed, there are no errors. But whenever the trigger is thrown by the motion sensor's ON signal, there are no ack errors to the hallway light about 30% to 40% of the time. The 2413U PLM is within 10 feet of the 3-gang box and the PLM is plugged into a circuit that goes into that 3-gang box (though the hallway light is on a different breaker than the circuit the PLM is plugged into, i.e. there are 2 separate circuits going into that 3-gang box). Running the iHealth suite showed no significant difference in communicating with the hallway light as compared to any other power-line device in my setup.

I'm currently using Indigo 5.0.3 (though the problem was identical with Indigo 4.1.20). It seems that the real problem is with the INSTEON communication protocol and message collision. Short of using an AppleScript (or Python script) in the trigger with a "delay 0.1" before sending the ON command, is there something that can be done in Indigo to artificially delay a trigger for about 0.1 seconds to allow the triggering INSTEON message and ACK to complete before sending out the triggered INSTEON command? As far as I can tell, the shortest settable trigger delay is 0.02 minutes (about 1.2 seconds) which is too long for a motion activated light.

Posted on
Wed Feb 08, 2012 6:42 pm
jay (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 18199
Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

No. And, a 0.1 second delay most likely wouldn't help - it would have to be longer than that for the cleanup messages to clear the line I would think. I'd be interested to hear if you try a script of some kind and find that 0.1 second does in fact work consistently.

It is, however, a collision problem as you surmise. INSTEON isn't very good at dealing with them. At all...

Jay (Indigo Support)
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Posted on
Thu Feb 09, 2012 9:17 pm
nsheldon offline
Posts: 2469
Joined: Aug 09, 2010
Location: CA

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Hi Jay.

Ugh, yea. Data collision. Reminds me of the old coax ethernet days and Token Rings. Routed data is more complex, but much more reliable. Oh well. Can't change home automation hardware for a different protocol now. :-)

Yes, 0.1 seconds was insufficient. However, after going through the iHealth results, I noticed the average latency for almost all the INSTEON items was between 180 and 190 milliseconds, so I changed the hallway motion sensor trigger to execute AppleScript with the "delay 0.2" instruction just before "turn on device 'Hallway Light'". This seemed to clear up most of the problems, though there does seem to be an additional interference issue that's probably not related to INSTEON communication. I've ordered a SwitchLinc Dimmer (dual-band) and will replace the existing hallway SwitchLinc Dimmer with that. Hopefully the addition of RF reception will overcome whatever other interference seems to be getting around all the FilterLincs I have.

Posted on
Fri Feb 10, 2012 4:13 pm
nsheldon offline
Posts: 2469
Joined: Aug 09, 2010
Location: CA

Re: Device send failed (no acknowledgement)

Just a follow-up. Further testing (at least for my setup) seems to indicate that a delay of 0.8 seconds is actually better at eliminating all the collision-related errors I was noticing.

Page 1 of 1

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 12 guests