I am operating Openhab 3.4.1 Release build. I constantly struggled with my 4 Fibaro Motion Sensors. After bringing them back to life again. Fresh exclusion, inclusion, new batteries beginning of Januar, they worked. Yesterday, I realized that two of them are not communicating with the controller anymore. Thing status is online, showing no problems, devices happily blinking but they do not communicate to the controller.
Checked the battery - ok
Woke the up several time - no change
Restarted the system - two of worked, the other ones stuck in REQUEST_INF …
Apart from the fact, that I don’t know why I have this break down again, I realized another strange thing…
I disabled the thing in the UI and activated again… the status REQUEST_INF on the GUI disappeared and the thing seems to be Online. However, when starting a healing process the log says it is still in REQUEST_INF.
Two questions:
what can I do to bring them back again and get it robustly running?
what is the purpose of disabling a thing on the GUI and what is expected to happen after deactivation?
I have a Fibaro motion sensor and it seems to work good. How close are the nodes to the controller? Do you have mains powered nodes in the mesh as well?
I took all of my fibaro motion sensors out of service (I had 6) for this very reason. I’ve had no issues at all with the other fibaro devices I use, but every one of the motion sensors had this exact issue of eventually (timeframe from 2 weeks to 6 months) the devices simply stopped all communication with the controller and the only way to get them back is the process you used of full exclusion and re-inclusion. I fought with these things for probably 18 months, I never found a solution.
This is not specific to the z-wave binding, of course, but disabling a Thing has a few uses. For example, I recently moved over from Z-Wave connection to my August lock to the new API binding. I didn’t want to delete the old August Things in case the transiton didn’t go over well, so I just temporarily disabled the Z-Wave thing for my August lock until I knew everything was working. Also disabling and re-enabling things is a good way to get the re-initialized. Sometimes one of the online service bindings will have trouble connecting and the things will go offline. Disabling the thing and re-enabling it restarts the initialization process to the connection to the online service is re-established.
Exactly what happens when you disable a Thing depends quite a bit on the Thing and the Binding it comes from. At the very least Items Linked to the Things Channels will no longer get communications from the device/service that the thing represents.
Here’s another one: I recently had my gas fireplace serviced. To prevent openHAB from turning it on while the technician was under the hood, I disabled the thing.
I have a bunch of power supplied sensors. The two motion sensors which are affected are 5-7 meters away from power supplied ones. And one the affected ones is near by other ones which are working. This cannot be the reason … and the by the way they worked for 2 weeks which I can see from the temperature charts they reported.
I am really at a point to give up with those motion sensors. There is no point in having motion sensors which are not working reliably
