What do you mean by this? That you have to pair the tri sensor to the contoller again?
You don’t have to reboot/turn off the Rip every time you make a change to HA. You just have to restart the HA server.
I do restart the server but I don’t leave my RPI on while I’m trying to add devices and code. I don’t think it’s secure enough at the moment to leave the power on all the time and connected to my router.
Wow, I think I have no more ideas on how to help you. It feels like we are just going around in circles and repeating the same things over again and then you occasionally throw in a curve ball to make things more confusing.
How do you not leave your RPi on and still add devices and change the code? the devices & code are stored on the Pi. And saying that you restart the server while also not leaving your Pi on makes no sense on how that would even work.
As far as security, I’m not sure what you are expecting. As long as you have your set up protected by a username/password then it’s just as secure as any other device on your network.
And if you don’t trust it to stay on & connected all the time then how is it that you plan on using it for any home automations since it literally won’t work if it’s not on/connected.
the zwave.xxx and sourcenodeid sensor have nothing to do with the actual sensor entities. I’m pretty sure it’s the same with the alarm type sensor. the only things that will (might) change are the temp, lux, alarm level and burglar sensors. Either the device has a binary sensor that it uses to show motion detected/not detected (from looking at the docs I think it should) or it will either use use the burglar sensor or the alarm level sensor to signal motion detected. If it uses the burglar/alarm level sensor then when you trigger the motion detector it should change from something like 0 to something like 255.
If you look at all of the entities associated with the trisensor then you need to look and see what values change when you trigger the device with motion. Go to the states page and in the “filter entities” field type in “trisensor” (without quotes) and it will list all of the entities (and only those entities) that are associated with the trisensor. Once you do that you can trigger the motion detector and see what changes and to what value.
I don’t have my yaml secrets file set up yet and I’m not sure network key is active, so that is why I keep my device off-line…oh and I 'am setting up IPfire firewall and that’s not complete yet.
Here is what Aeotec said, but I don’t think it’s correct.
So maybe I should use Burglar setting to trigger motion for lights?
This is what is available in states when I type in Trisensor.
I triggered burglar by turning state on and got this
But my lights remained on when they should turn off after a min and turn on when motion detected.
And this is sensor sensitivity value
Why do you think this is never in the “ready” mode? It’s just initializing
Do I need to add anything to my “sensor” in config yaml?
secrets.yaml has nothing at all to do with the security of your HA instance. The only thing the secrets file does is allows you to easily share your config with others (i.e. like on this forum or on github) without worrying about needing to scrub any personal information from your configuration files.
By this I assume you mean your zwave network key?
If so then it has next to nothing to do with your HA security either. It only prevents people who might have an RF sniffer from reading the packets on your zwave network. I doubt it’s a big deal, security wise, if someone can figure out when your motion sensor is on or off.
as long as you don’t have any ports open on your router and you have a username and password set up on your HA you’ll probably be as secure as necessary.
But OK whatever…
Why would you doubt that Aeotec is correct?
They are the ones who designed and built the device that you asked them the question about. I think they will likely know more about what will or what won’t work than you (or me…).
Did you try to actually do what they told you to do?
I already said above you could use that sensor to do what you want but I still say it will be better if you can get a binary sensor to work.
But if you insist on using “_burglar” then you need to figure out what the value is when the sensor gets triggered by motion and when the sensor is not triggered.
From that picture I’m not sure if that is the triggered or the un-triggered state because I’m not sure what this means:
How did you “turn the state on”? did you wave your hand in front of the sensor and see the value change and then see it go back to some other value a bit after you stopped moving in front of it?
look at the state of your “sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_burglar” in the third picture. It says “8”.
Look at the state you are trying to use in your automations. They say “on” & “off”. those two implementations aren’t the same. “on” or “off” is not equal to “8” and never will be.
I want you do three things:
-
try what the Aeotec rep told you to do and attempt to get the binary report working on the device.
-
if you can’t/won’t do that then you need to tell me what the state of the “_burglar” sensor is when you wave your hand in front of the sensor (motion detected) and after 5 minutes of not waving your hand in front of the sensor (no motion detected).
-
I want you to copy and paste your actual code from your automations into the post box and I want it to be properly formatted by doing the following:
it should end up in your post looking almost exactly like you have it in your config file.
I don’t mind helping you with the code but I’m not interested in writing out the entire two automations in full to show you what needs to be done. It’s easier for me to copy your code and make any necessary changes and I can’t do that when you post a screen shot instead of the actual code in text format.
I do want to use the binary sensor like you and Aeotec mentioned, but those parameters were not possible from what I could see? I’ll change my yaml file to use binary sensor. Not sure how to set those parameter values?
Aeotec sent this to…but I think we can try the binary sensor somehow with your knowledge
AS I was adding binary sensor to yaml file and restarting, I saw this. First time to see Trisensor “Sleeping”.
However, I was able to capture this as I was trying to set values.
And that came from this. Set Config Parameter
Here is my automations.yaml file:
#- alias: some alias timed lights
# initial_state: 'true'
# trigger:
# platform: time
# at: "22:35:00"
# action:
# service: switch.turn_on
# entity_id: switch.light_livingroom_couch
- alias: Turn on couch light when there is movement
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_sensor
to: 'on'
action:
service: switch.turn_on
entity_id: switch.ge_14288_duplex_receptacle_switch
- alias: Turn off couch light 1 minutes after last movement
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_sensor
to: 'off'
for:
minutes: 1
action:
service: switch.turn_off
entity_id: switch.ge_14288_duplex_receptacle_switch
Would you be interested in doing a Remote Login using Chrome Remote Desktop? That way you can look at my files etc and make any changes.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en
Great news!! I was able to get the sensor to turn on/off my lights. I’m not sure how the time part works, but it’s the script I sent you.
So both lights under Switch, turn the lights on/off. When there is motion detected, the lights are turned on again (this part works).
The odd thing is that the lights turn off after 4 min 30 seconds?
The only thing I can think of is the platform is set to State and might need to be set to Time? I did set it to Time but got lots of errors when I did check config.
The great news is it’s working! And with some tweeking, it should read that script correctly for the time portion.
Then that means that, unless you made a change to get the binary sensor to show up then you HAVE TO HAVE had a “binary_sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_sensor” in your entities listing or it wouldn’t work at all. That entity_id HAS TO EXIST. Did you do anything to make that change?
next, the time that it takes to turn off seems right to me.
the device should turn on the binary_sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_sensor when it sees motion and most devices will will keep the signal on for a few minutes before it turns off again.
so, since you have it set for being off for 1 minute then lets say the device keeps the binary_sensor.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor_sensor on for three minutes after detecting last motion before the state changes to off then 1 minute later it will trigger the automation to turn off the switch. so, a total of 4 minutes from the last motion detected will have passed before the switch gets turned off.
don’t change the platform. keep it where it is. if anything you can just remove the lines dealing with “for:” and as soon as the binary sensor turns off (hasn’t detected motion for several minutes) the switch will turn off.
-
I just turned the RPI back on when I got home, And the UI does not show the sensor “sleeping”…However the motion sensor still works and turned on ONE of the switches but not both? After 4.5 min, the light turned off.
-
Now I am going to Z Wave Node Management. I select: “Aeotec Trisensor (Node 4)”, Followed by “binary-sensor …”
-
Below this, I selected Node Values:
"Sensor(Instance: 1, Index: 0) ",
I left “Node Group Associations” blank,
Node Config Options is default 2880,
“Set Wakeup” config parameter to 3. Motion Sensitivity and config value set to 8 (1-11 options),
Then I clicked set config parameter ( to save it), But when I clicked to save it all, it just kept trying to save it?? I believe this happened last time too.
I logged out and back in and now it’s all working…
The back room light is still not turning on with motion, only the couch? I manually turned it on from the UI. After 4.5 min the couch light turned off again but NOT the back room?
What do you think?
I found why only one light was turning on:
entity_id:
switch.ge_14288_duplex_receptacle_switch
VS
entity_id:
switch.ge_14288_duplex_receptacle_switch, switch.ge_14288_duplex_receptacle_switch_2
Weird because they were both working last night and I hadn’t added the switch2 yet??
I think you caused this to be way more complicated than it should have been.
Where did the binary sensor come from? Did you do something to get it to appear or has it always been there? Either way that information would have been useful and what I’ve been trying to get you to do for the last several rounds of posts.
Why are you going into the Zwave control panel and making changes there for unrelated parameters when you don’t have any idea what you are changing or why? It’s working correctly. Don’t mess with it.
There is no way it could have worked without the entity being included in some automation somewhere. And there is no way for it to stop working without you removing it from some configuration somewhere. It’s not the way things work.
From now on when you are trying to get help you really need to try harder to do pretty much exactly as the person helping you is requesting that you do. If I ask you to do something or give me some information and you do something else without telling me or you ignore the question/answer a question that wasn’t asked then it makes it that much more difficult to get things straightened out and working. You end up with a confused mess of posts that usually end up not accomplishing anything.
I’m glad it’s working for you now and hopefully this has at least been a learning experience for you.
I’ve definitely learned a thing or two here, especially with your help.
The only two things I changed are: 1. Your suggestion of using the binary sensor in yaml file (adding this to the automations yaml file did not change the node notification on the Overview page UI).
2. The only other thing I did was go into the Zwave control panel and select node 4 and fill in the drop down I sent screen shots of. I really don’t want to rely on this Zwave controller panel over a file I can add code to, but it throws a flag (Overview page (Entity not available: node-_4)) if I don’t fill in the drop downs??
I never ever suggested adding a binary sensor into a yaml file anywhere except using an already created & existing binary_sensor in your automation.
The reason I know I didn’t tell you to do that is because I know that you can’t create a binary_sensor from a z wave device by configuring anything in yaml. It can only be created by the z wave device and it’s discovery by HA in the z wave implementation.
So either it was already there previously the whole time during the discussion above (which I think is likely the case) or you changed something later to get the device to create one.
That’s kind of what I’m saying. I tried to get you to find that binary sensor by telling you exactly how to do it several times and you just didn’t seem to want to follow my instructions. So it ended up making things harder for both of us in the end.
Yes, and I have no idea why you did that.
Those values are already there by default when you pair the device to the controller and the vast majority of the time everything will work out of the box. The only time it’s necessary to modify those is in very limited situations. For example, you might need to change the report type to send parameter to get the device to create a binary_sensor in HA. Which is what I and the Aeotec people were trying to tell you to do but you insisted they were somehow wrong.
For future reference, generally, you won’t ever need to change those parameters.
I really don’t know why your node showed up one time and then later it didn’t. I really have no way of knowing what was happening in your system for that to happen. And you turning off the RPi all the time for extended periods could be contributing to the flakiness of your system since it takes a bit of time after you power everything up for all of the nodes to communicate to the controller that they exist and what state they are in.
But I’m fairly confident that it had nothing to do with needing to configure every parameter. But, for arguments sake, if for some reason that wasn’t the case then I also feel confident that your device isn’t working correctly. But seeing as how you also had troubles with getting the outlets configured in the beginning, I doubt that is the case. It is more likely operator error.
The “error” you are seeing in the lovelace card is telling you that for some reason you have the card set up to display the state of “zwave.unknown_node_4” but the lovelace frontend can’t find that exact entity_id existing in your system. My question now is why are you trying to find the state of that entity when the entity it should be looking for is “zwave.aeotec_zwa005_trisensor”?
I am assuming you are configuring the lovelace frontend thru either the GUI or in yaml mode?
I’m definitely perplexed as to why things are working the way they are.
Would you be open to using Remote desktop to see my system?
I’ve never used google remote desktop but I would be open to that if it really becomes necessary.
However, right now, things are working as you want them (correct?). So at this point I don’t see the need to do that. If, however, another problem pops up in the future we could go down that route at that point if you still want to.
I have not used it either.
Just wondering if you wanted to check the files and HA UI to see what I did? But that is ok. I’ll be adding more entities soon. I need an electrician to check some of this old wiring, as my light switches ( not outlets) do not work with the current wiring.
My next task is the electrician for my lights THEN I’d like to get my thermostat, tv and music using HA then ultimately using the “Snips” to voice control all devices.
Do you have your Thermostat, Tv and music set up?
No on the tv.
Not yet on the thermostat.
I have a Chromecast audio set up but it’s kind of flaky at times. And they aren’t really audio players specifically but I have my echo dots setup in HA and they show up as audio players.
How do I get these into a better UI look on Lovelace?
What happens if I get a power outage, my entity setting will have to be set manually again, any ideas?