FLiRS allows battery devices to be (reasonably) responsive. Most (ie nearly all) ZWave battery devices sleep for 99%+ of the time - you can’t send them anything in that period. This is fine for sensors, but if you want to open your door, then you don’t want to wait 1 hour till the lock wakes up.
A FLiRS device will wake up more often (a number of times per second - depending on the exact implementation). This makes it pretty responsive - a bit of lag, but less than 1 second, and certainly not 1 hour.
Any battery device can use this system, but at the moment, it is mostly implemented by door locks (ie something that opens your front door). There are a couple of radiator thermostats on the market now that also use FLiRS which is great for them as well).
You’ll need more than this for a good mesh. It’s pretty hard to give exact statements as the performance of RF, especially with these devices (small antennas that aren’t aligned), and different types of house construction (wood, brick, concrete) all impact on the performance.
I just checked for my Neo Coolcam PIR (ZWAVE PLUS) of course battery driven, and it says: Zwave-beaming TRUE.
Is this now for all ZWAVE PLUS devices even when battery driven or does it just say when the device is not sleeping it can beam.
(Beam me up Scotty:slight_smile: )
Both the listening and frequent flags are false, therefore device doesn’t support FLiRS - this is the important thing.
For sure it is not a ZWave Plus feature that requires all devices to support FLiRS - it’s down to individual devices. Most battery devices won’t use it at the power drain is higher, and therefore battery life will be lower. It’s also not necessary for most devices.
Do you have any documents you can link on this? I can’t seem to find anything that defines FLiRS as separate from beaming.
Z-wave alliance only seems to list beaming as supported yes/no. I don’t see any mention of FLiRS even on lock devices.
The way I have understood it is that if a mains powered device supports beaming, it is capable of sending the wake signal. If a battery device supports beaming, it would support FLiRS.
I looked at a few different devices and only the door locks seem to have beaming = yes. Motion sensors and the like all say no.
I’m just trying to outline a reliable method of identifying capabilities of devices prior to purchasing. I feel like if z-wave alliance was going to go to all the trouble of building that database and FLiRS vs non-FLiRS was a valid datapoint… it would be listed.
FLiRS is the receive side, and beaming is the transmit side - the two a different parts of the same story. The frequently_listening flag in the node properties means it supports FLiRS (The FL in FLiRS being Frequently Listening).
As I already said there are also some new thermostats - eg the Spirit. Most sensor just use listening=false - ie the wakeup command class.
