Insteon Sensors - check for dead battery?

Posted on
Sun May 20, 2018 11:22 am
rbdubz3 offline
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Insteon Sensors - check for dead battery?

I have a number of Insteon sensors - motion, door, leak - kinda stinks that none of them can let you know when the battery level is low. The motion sensor does have an event - but it doesn't seem to work reliably. I am planning to write some code to alert when a sensor device battery appears dead. Not quite a 'low battery' alert, but I am not sure what else to do. At least this will alert me reactively without weeks going by.

I was gonna check the sensor attribute 'lastSuccessfulComm', which looks to happen at least once per day. For door and leak sensors, I see there is a 'heartbeat' event triggered. For some reason Insteon doesn't support heartbeat for Motion Sensors. However, examining my Indigo logs it looks like some type of a status check is done daily by Indigo? This likely updates the 'lastSuccessfulComm' field as well

Anyone else have a good recommendation for alerting on low/dead batteries of Insteon Sensors?

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Posted on
Sun May 20, 2018 11:43 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: Insteon Sensors - check for dead battery?


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Posted on
Mon May 21, 2018 8:30 am
rbdubz3 offline
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Re: Insteon Sensors - check for dead battery?

Thanks Jay.. So I'll be modifying the script for my Insteon Sensors which don't support 'low battery' - it'll be more of a 'Dead Battery' than 'Low Battery' notification - but I'll take what I can get.

Is 'lastChanged' the best attribute for checking? I did see 'lastSuccessfulComm' as well. I've been scanning these manually in the last day and they look to be the same. I was thinking 'lastSuccessfulComm' sounded better since it should be updated even if the device state didn't change (I'd think)

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