Inactivity Watch - more detail on recommended use?

Posted on
Fri May 25, 2018 10:49 am
dduff617 offline
Posts: 659
Joined: Jul 05, 2006
Location: Massachusetts, USA

Inactivity Watch - more detail on recommended use?

I'm trying to employ inactivity watch to do a more thorough job of checking for some problems in my system.

Insteon motion detectors and older open/close sensors (previously known as TriggerLincs) don't report battery at all, don't do it reliably, and/or are prone to going into a zombie state where they stay unresponsive until they are manually woken. So, I thought I'd try setting up a few Inactivity Watch objects to report this for my various devices.

I aran into some questions:

How to trigger?

What is the recommended way to trigger so that I can send a notification when there is an inactive device, or when a device is newly detected as being inactive? If I set up an Indigo trigger based on my Inactivity Watch device, I'm confused as there seems to be only one state (called "Found") that appears in the trigger configuration dialog. If i inspect the actual device in the Indigo device view, there appears to be a state called "Inactive" and empirically, seems to conform to what is implied in the docs - i.e. it is either a list of integers (deviceID's) or a comma-delimited string of "<device-name> (<time since last activity>)". Are these merely different names for the same state?

How to access inactive device list for use in a notification?

Not being an experienced plugin developer, my understanding is lacking regarding exactly what appears in the Indigo "Device Details" window vs. what appears in "Custom States" vs. what appears in the configuration menus for triggers for device states and whether/how different values can be accessed from a script or referenced in a string-substitution. Can I access the Found state using the normal string substitution method, i.e. "%%d:1234567:Found%%" or should I use "%%d:1234567:inactive%%"?

How to update?

Also, I see there is an Update action available (Device Actions>Cynical Behaviors Controls>Update Now) and the config for this action allows me to select my Inactivity Watch device. I would like to be able to force an update, for example after I've replaced a battery or fixed a problem and I would like to get updated notifications that reflect most current information. The config is confusing however, because it prompts me for a "Button Device" - I'm not sure what that means or if it matters - it does at least let me enter an Inactivity Watch object... Will this action cause the contents of the Found / inactive states of the Inactivity Watch object to be updated?

The docs provided for Cynical Behaviors are great and show a lot of thought and work and attention to detail. One suggestion is that it would be helpful to provide one or two example "use-cases" to show the intended use and explain in a bit more detail how the described states/features map to Indigo's architecture.

Sorry for being "lazy" - I suspect I could determine answers to all of these questions with enough trial and error... however, I hope that by recording answers here, it may provide some useful feedback or will save time for others, too.

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