Re-activating Zigbee device after battery replacement

1

Every time one of my Zigbee devices runs out of battery I have a hard time re-activating the device after I replaced its battery. Even though OpenHAB shows the device as online, OpenHAB will continue to show stale data.

What is the recommended approach to re-activate Zigbee devices after battery replacement?

That said, it would be great if OpenHAB would show a timestamp when the last data was received from a device.

2

I can’t help with the first part as I don’t have battery powered Zigbee devices that have this problem. Just a couple of push buttons.

However, for the last part there are several options available to you.

  1. In a rule every Item has a lastStateChanged and lastStateUpdated property which is the timestamp when that Item was last updated and/or changed.
  2. With persistence configured in certain ways, you can pull that value from persistence.
  3. One can link the same Channel to a DateTime Item and use the timestamp profile to update that Item with now when the Item is updated or changed.
3

Thanks for your insightful reply.

Unfortunately, one of the main pain points is the “Zigbee device runs out of battery” story. I can’t imagine that the only way to re-activate the device is to delete it and re-pair it. Surely there exists a more user friendly story that I simply don’t know.