GE Switch ApplicationUpdate Message to Trigger Rule

Hello, I am new to OpenHAB and this forum. I recently switched over from SmartThings after they released a horrible update to their UI. I was sick of relying on the cloud so now I am here. I’m loving OpenHAB and all that it can do, but I do have questions.

I have several z-wave GE switches that send ApplicationUpdate messages when you physically touch the switch. I see the ApplicationUpdate message in my z-wave log just about every time I push a button (except on the slave switch). The ApplicationUpdate message then triggers OpenHAB to poll the switch. The problem is that the ApplicationUpdate message is not always received. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I read somewhere on a Vera forum that the ApplicationUpdate message is sent directly to the controller and is not repeated through the mesh network. I actually modded my Aeon Z-stick to have a longer antenna and this helped with the reception immensely, but every now and then the controller misses a button push so I setup the switch to be polled every 10 minutes so that the state eventually becomes known.

The problem with polling the switch using a refresh interval is that I can no longer setup a rule that triggers on the switch receiving updates because I cannot figure out how to differentiate a refresh poll vs. a button push. Ultimately, what I am trying to accomplish is to use additional button presses when the switch is already on/off to turn on/off additional switches. For example, after turning on the side light to my house I could then hit the on button again to turn on all lights outside. Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do? I would really love it if refresh polls only triggered an item to receive an update if there was a state change. I know what I am trying to do is possible, but I’m not sure if it is possible the way OpenHAB is currently coded.

Yes - this is correct. ApplicationUpdate messages do not get routed.

Sorry - can you rephrase this - I don’t know what you mean…

Yeah, I wasn’t too clear on that…Nor what I said really makes sense looking back. I tried making a rule triggered when my switch item received an update. However, the rule is triggered on every refresh interval in addition to the poll generated from the ApplicationUpdate message. It would be nice if I could somehow create a rule that is just triggered by the ApplicationUpdate message. I don’t see any possible way to do that right now.

No - I don’t think there’s any way that this can easily be implemented since it’s digging down into the lower layers of zwave, and you can’t really access this sort of thing from OH… OH provides a device independant abstraction through the binding so the binding doesn’t expose specific functionality of a protocol etc…

It might be possible to bodge something yourself for your own use if you wanted to hack the binding, but I don’t think it’s something that would be generally good practice in OH unless someone can think of how such a concept can fit into the OH system…