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Geek stuff: Z-Wave Routing, Packets and Serial API


petergebruers

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  • Many people expect to find the cause of their delays on that chart. I'm sorry but those maps are not terribly helpful.

     

    EDIT:

     

    I am sorry if that sounded unfriendly... That whole topic is dedicated to "routing" and I encourage everyone to read the whole topic because I explain a few concepts and first and foremost that Z-Wave Routing is not like IP routing. You must forget everything you know about IP routing

     

    To diagnose delays you either need very detailed logging or a Zniffer

    Edited by petergebruers
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    Please login or register to see this image.

    /monthly_2019_02/718971801_Untitled1.jpg.aa44b366f2bb2a1c7d6dd4fe232a4074.jpg" alt="718971801_Untitled1.jpg.aa44b366f2bb2a1c7d6dd4fe232a4074.jpg" />

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  • Nope... That picture won't help either. I can say that you probably should try to reduce traffic... But that is about it.

     

     

    I probably cannot help you!

     

    I think you may have missed my first post, but not to worry, I'll summarize it for you

     

    On 2/20/2019 at 12:34 PM, petergebruers said:

    I'm trying to get in touch with people who have (deep) understanding of Z-Wave and want do discuss this with me.

     

    Background: I have tried, and I am still trying to help people experiencing delays. Those problems are not necessarily Z-Wave related, but it certainly can be a part of their issues.

     

    (...)

     

    I'm trying to get in touch with people who either understand what that data means, or at least want to find out for themselves.

     

    I understand most of it, but at the moment I hesitate to explain things in detail, in this post because I have this feeling... that it is not going to be of interest to most users.

     

    (....)

     

    If I knew where to go from here, I would not have written this post :)

     

    In case you understand what this is about, and want to chat with me, challenge me, or have something interesting to say, please share. If you don't understand... Don't worry, you won't need it.

     

    So what I am saying is, that I try to better understand what is going on. I can understand that you came here and thought "this guy can help me" but in fact I doubt that... I have tried to help many users and some have improved theorie network, but still things remain unsolved.

     

     

     

    Edited by petergebruers
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  • The main issue with fixing delays is this: you do not have diagnostic tools. What we  then do is guessing, guessing and keep guessing! Try this parameter. Improve that code! Try mesh update. Rewrite that virtual device...

     

    And this goes on for days, weeks and sometimes even months!

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  • Just now, Aleksandr Meinson said:

    2 years

    That is a new record, in a bad way. I believe you! It must be very frustrating... Let me think about what you can do next. Let me sleep on it...

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    On 2/20/2019 at 1:34 PM, petergebruers said:

    I decided to write my own (Python) program to send NOPS on a test network, to one or two devices, and analyse the result.

    Did not quite understand your answer, perhaps it was sarcasm?
    Can you give a new idea, where to start looking for a problem?
    Search from the other side.
    As I wrote, the problem began with 20 devices, now I have 120.
    He broke the grid in half, put another HC2, another problem appeared, the connection between HC2-HC2 after 6-8 days is not correct and you have to restart both devices, does it happen before the Z-wave hangs? It was the council of Poland.
    Now I reset the devices back to one HC2.

    Can use your program Python?

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  • 25 minutes ago, Aleksandr Meinson said:

    Did not quite understand your answer, perhaps it was sarcasm?

    No sarcasm.

     

    Never sarcasm!

     

    That does not work well on a forum...

     

    You can have my script, but it can only send nops to nodes added to your UZB1.

     

    I am not at home, but tonight I can send you a PM

     

    25 minutes ago, Aleksandr Meinson said:

     Can you give a new idea, where to start looking for a problem?

     

    I don't know what you know. I don't know what you have tried... I don't know if you have problems with code. Not all delays are Z-Wave related.

     

    It would take me several days just to understand your situation.

     

    Here is a fundamental question for you: do you want to invest time and money and learn how to use a Zniffer? I can help you to get started, and I can tell you which parts of the docs to read.

     

    There is no guaranteed improverent though.

     

    If the answer is no, here are a few options:

     

    - you can keep guessing and trying. Have you added sleep(250) between sending commands? Have you set parameters to reduce power reporting?

    - you can try Fibaro support, they have access to your log. Either local support or Poland

    - you can contact an installer (and pay him)

    - you can ditch your HC2 and try a different product which has logging. But if the problem is Z-Wave, you still have no solution.

    - you can start from scratch. Exclude every node. Reset the controller. Start by adding good mains devices to form the mesh. Copy all scenes but carefully put them back, one by one. Go slowly and after each step evaluate performance.

    Edited by petergebruers
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  • @1152 Question: do you have delays at this moment? If so could you give an idea of how long they are and how often you have them? I had a quick look at your previous post and I got the impression that you are not complaining. Maybe I am wrong.

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    1 hour ago, petergebruers said:

     

     

    1 hour ago, petergebruers said:

    I had a quick look at your previous post and I got the impression that you are not complaining. Maybe I am wrong.

    I already had such moments when I took everything in one big pile and wanted to send it all back to the seller !!!
    White hair was added on the head.
    But everything set everything back, and now again I am teaching in the computer.
    At the beginning, the wave froze once a month, then 20-30 days, it was time (about half a year) exactly 6 days. Poland looked, I did not get an answer.
    advised to install a second NS2.
    The problem is in communication between HC2, you have to do a reboot every 6 days, before the wave freezes.
    Now I am transferring back to one NS2, this is happening to me slowly, there is still work that feeds my family.
    I also constantly make a copy, which causes the HC2 to reboot.
    My question is: when rebooting, where does boot priority come from? from the cloud or from memory?
    Where better to save a copy? in memory of?

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  • I understand. Let's continue the discussion via PM....

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    3 hours ago, petergebruers said:

    @1152 Question: do you have delays at this moment? If so could you give an idea of how long they are and how often you have them? I had a quick look at your previous post and I got the impression that you are not complaining. Maybe I am wrong.

     

    I´m not complaining. I'm just trying to understand some of the fundamentals to navigate accordingly. At the moment I have two z-wave networks. One at home and the other at my summer house. Both served by a HC2 and both have been up and running for several years. When i bought into z-wave I was well aware it was early days. Now with the 500, an about to hit marked the 700-series chip, z-wave should have matured. Backwards compatibility is absolutely a pre, but I just like to know "the cost" as I renew/upgrade and integrate with other systems for my HA. Just got the Roomba i7+ and nanoleaf canvas in house and installed. In general my set up at home have been one step ahead and an order of magnitude bigger than my summer house setup. This started to change last year and I belive will end up on par this year with sonos, gardena smart system ++ . Through the years I have had less issues with the smaller system in my summer house. The issues experienced regarding instability, dead nodes, routing and delays have been at home. At present with 4.530 I only occasionally experience delays, and if it happens normally just a few seconds delay. I do however have a couple of issues with recurring dead nodes that I believe are related. The problematic devices have however been working without noticeable problems earlier with earlier versions of fw.

     

    I do not want to highjack this tread and focus on issues I experience, but was merely trying to discuss our fundamental understanding of z-wave, how it matures - and to a certain extent how Fibaro is coping.  

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    10 hours ago, Aleksandr Meinson said:

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    I know it's off this topic, but your Z-traffic goes high - event per 1.6 sec.

    To my opinion is too high! Try to reduce it to max event per 3 sec.

     

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  • 6 hours ago, 1152 said:

    I do not want to highjack this tread and focus on issues I experience, but was merely trying to discuss our fundamental understanding of z-wave, how it matures - and to a certain extent how Fibaro is coping.

    Don't worry about hijacking. I asked you to elaborate...

    I am not sure if I ever will be able to answer that question but this is "step 1"... Trying to get a deep understanding of Z-Wave and this is the main subject of this topic.

     

    About delays and dead nodes, I'll send you a PM.

     

    4 hours ago, cag014 said:

    I know it's off this topic, but your Z-traffic goes high - event per 1.6 sec.

    To my opinion is too high! Try to reduce it to max event per 3 sec.

    Yes I think my topic got hijacked a bit but I also understand how desperate people can get... It would be unfair for me if I did not accept the "cry for help".

     

    Anyway because each personal situation is different I'm probably going to say a lot 'let us continue via PM" a lot.

     

    And "Yes" I think it is too high. I have 90 nodes... After about 1 hour of monitoring:

     

    Average traffic = 20.4 sec.
    Z-traffic range = 14.5 - 33.9 sec.
     

    That is the result of monitor and tuning. Without effort that could be 10 x higher!

     

    I also would like to add, I live in a compact house (Okay that depends on where you live, you can see the floor plan in a previous post) so I do have mostly directed packets (no routing involved).

     

    I cannot give precise stats because that would require Zniffing the network and doing some statistical analysis, and I do not have the tool(s) for that yet.

     

    The best I can give right now is the summary of LWR after a mesh reconfigure an this tells me:

     

    Please login or register to see this code.

    I think we are getting "back on topic" with that information.

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    Does any of your routing tools (directly) tell you the speed of a certain route? Z-wave support 4 hops and I presume a given route degrades to the lowest speed given by the weakest leg/node. So when routing I expect the direct connection always to be preferred/used if available. But for the other options, could a route with more hops outperform/be preferred to a route with less hops, but possibly slower due to a weaker connection?

     

    I'm still trying to understand the performance degradation (cost) of backward compatibility in a mesh network, and if it would be possible to analyze the network to identify nodes that are critical to the speed an hence available air time. Of course there are likely other issues than pure speed that we should be concerned about as well. If so, what are these and how do we identify their impact in a given real word situation.

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  • I will investigate this, and report in great detail when I am ready.

     

    I can give a few (interesting) points though.

     

    Zniffer can tell exactly tell the speed of each packet and repeated packet, but if you need routing, it might be a bit difficult. Let me explain why with an example.

     

    They are all "far away" and route is controller -> A,B,C

        Controller ----- Node A (repeater) ---- Node B ---- Node C (destination or source)

    Where do you put your Zniffer? If you put it near the controller, you won't "hear" B or C because if your Zniffer cannot hear more than your controller. In fact it is hard to predict the difference, changing orientation, grounding can give between 0 and 10 dB difference in my tests...

     

    Higher speed means lower sensitivity, the spec of the ZM5101 says, typical values for the chip without filter:

     

    Sensitivity at 9.6 kbps, received power, FER < 1% is -104.5

    At 40 k it is -100.6

    At 100 k it is -94.3

     

    FER = Frame Error Rate.

     

    They say that a typical antenna filter decreases that number by about 5 dB

     

    This is a 500 SoC so it beats the 300 series.

     

    It is not easy to find which is "best" - do you want speed or reliability or range?

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    20 hours ago, cag014 said:

    I know it's off this topic, but your Z-traffic goes high - event per 1.6 sec.

    To my opinion is too high! Try to reduce it to max event per 3 sec.

     

     

    Today I have found two devices, One simply disappeared from the HC2 reason, the second did not respond to a change in routing.
    One device does not work "B" button (mechanically).
    Both devices do not want to be removed and added to the HC2. I also tried it on the second HC2 (it is empty, there are only 12 devices on it) I will watch the traffic tonight. Tomorrow I will send these devices to the seller, I will definitely tell you the answer.

    These are devices from the very first, after the first 20 pieces, I started having problems.

    Please login or register to see this attachment.

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    ... it is not easy to find which is "best" - do you want speed or reliability or range?

     

    Well what I want is one thing, the case here is what I get from my z-wave mesh... I would guess we get the best speed available with a defined/acceptable FER, or?  

    Edited by 1152
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    Hi Peter and others,

     

    I am a developer of Electronic Circuits, Products, PCB's & Embedded Software and know a lot about Electro-Magnetic Compatibilty (EMC) and Low Voltage Directives (LVD). This is how I earn my living with my own company.

    A few years ago I developped 4 Z-wave products + 1 Z-wave Proof of Concept. Due to Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA), I cannot elaborate about the products but I can elaborate about my experiences and still have the source files for reference.
    I worked with the official DevKit and System Development Kit (SDK).  So I dug deep into the protocol but may need to refresh some details. See my other posts on this forum. Lately, I am more into HC2 + LUA and will publish some pretty interesting geek-stuff soon. There are still some Z-Wave developments planned but not this year.

     

    As I have a family and a business to run, I will not be able to spend vast amounts of time on this forum but I am glad to discuss some geek-stuff so bear with me.

    Edited by BitBucket
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