i am using insteon integration, interfacing via an insteon PLM (2413U).
i have multiple instances of hidden motion sensor, insteon device 2845-222. each of these devices presents three entities: a door entity (open/closed), a battery entity, and a heartbeat entity.
the door entities seem to work fine and i can create automations for them.
HEARTBEAT
i don’t understand the heartbeat entities. for some of my devices, they seem to sometimes show changes in state - i.e., if i look at the history for the entity, i can see that it is mostly “ok” but occasionally goes through a period where it has value “problem”, but it doesn’t seem to work reliably and i can’t find any kind of documentation about this entity or its behavior.
can anyone tell me if it is possible to use this to detect whether a sensor is “alive” and if so how to do it in HA? a simple way that seems like it could work would be to just create an automation that waits for the heartbeat entity to change state. or is there some HA event generated when a heartbeat is received?
i can’t find any mention of “heartbeat” in the integration docs. i see an issue opened in 2021 that reports a problem with heartbeat for a different device. it’s not very informative since ticket was closed with no discussion or action.
anyone had success in setting up a automation for detecting heartbeat (or lack thereof) for hidden door sensor?
BATTERY
this unit does not report battery level directly, but it does send a low-battery warning message periodically when it senses that the battery is “low”.
from looking at my devices in home-assistant, I don’t think this low battery signal is working. instead the battery entities always seem to have state of “normal”.
so i have basically the same question: anyone had any success setting up an automation to detect low battery condition on these devices? seems like it should be simple. is it just me, or are other people seeing these issues?
both of these issues seem like bugs to me that the integration provides these entities but does not give them values that reflect the actual state of the device, but its hard for me to imagine such a basic bug hanging around for so long without being fixed. the HA platform i used previously (indigo) supported both heartbeat and low-battery triggers.
i have similar questions about for other insteon wireless devices including insteon open-close sensor (2843-222) and insteon leak sensor (2852-222), and motion sensor (2842-222 and the newer 2844-222).