Hi,
I'm very new to Hubitat so I'm trying to understand how things work. The hub arrived yesterday, I'm now trying to move devices from Wink to Hubitat.
I've added them successfully to Hubitat but 2 of them, one GoControl PIR motion sensor, and one GoControl contact sensor have shown the status "PENDING" for more than 2 hours. They don't register motion or open/close.
So what does PENDING mean? Is there anything I can do to help them to become operational?
Where do you see "pending"? That's not really a device state I can think of (unless I'm forgetting something or something's changed recently). It sounds like you might be looking at the "Scheduled Jobs" section of the device page, which shows events the driver has scheduled to run--usually not much, though if you just added a new device, there will probably be a job scheduled to turn off debug logging 30 minutes after you add it. You usually won't need to look there unless you're trying to troubleshoot something, and even then, unless you're using a custom driver, it's unlikely to be of much use since most events would come from apps (which this won't show--just things that the driver itself is doing).
Since they aren't showing motion or open/close, the next question is what driver you're using. This is what you see under "Type:" on the device page. It sounds like your devices should work with Generic Z-Wave Motion Sensor and Generic Z-Wave Contact Sensor, but if they aren't officially supported it's unlikely these drivers would have been chosen by default at pairing. You can switch it to the correct one yourself if that's the problem. (Choose it, click "Save Device," and if you see a "Configure" button/command at the top afterwards, probably run that too for good measure.)
If you do have the correct driver, maybe the devices themselves just aren't working. It's unlikely, but sometimes they never finish pairing, or if you accidentally reset them while they were pairing (e.g., because you think they didn't pair and you pressed a specific button sequence on the device or something again and then...oops), it's possible. Try removing them and re-adding them to see if that helps. For Z-Wave devices, Hubitat only lets you add one at a time, so do one, then exit and go back into (or reload) the "Discover Devices" page before trying again.
Does any of this sound like it might be the case?
Thanks a lot, I'll check the driver and see if there's anything else available.
Where I see it? On the dashboard it shows a big question mark and "unknown" instead of active/inactive on the device tile.
And you're right it did show the PENDING in the Scheduled Jobs table under Devices.
The driver is under "Type" on the device's edit/admin page (I'm never sure what to call that...), the same place you'd see the "PENDING" task you mentioned.
Dashboard, by the way, is intended for viewing and controlling devices; administrative tasks like changing a driver will need to be done from the admin UI.
Yes, I got it. Actually after saving that device (contact sensor) again, it became fully functional. The motion sensor was obviously out of reach. I took it off and moved it closer to the hub and it started to work.
Thanks so much for the support. Greatly appreciated.
OK, next issue.
I'm trying to pair the original Wink contact sensors. I did the exclusion, and afterwards the inclusion. Had to do it a couple of times but the sensor finally showed up.
"Found Z-Wave Device with id 08
Initializing"
But it's still in status "Initializing". The screen won't change to the point where I can name the sensor.
I did exclusion and inclusion again, and it shows up again, only now with the ID 09. So now I have 2 devices listed, both in status "Initializing".
Any idea what I can do to finalize the pairing process?
Waiting is probably the first step I'd take. Even if the countdown expires, it should let a Z-Wave device being paired finish the "initializing" stage. I think people have suggested "waking up" a device in the past if it gets stuck there, which you can check the device's manual to see, but is usually pressing a button or similar in/on the device. I'm not sure I've ever had to do this, but some Z-Wave devices can take a while.
Z-Wave will increment the ID by one (in hex) for each device you pair, even if it's the same device, so the ID you see is probably normal. If you're having problems pairing, you might want to try rebooting your hub, waiting a couple minutes, then trying again. You shouldn't have to do this, but some people have reported that it's helped. If you haven't done a factory reset on the Z-Wave device, that might help too, but usually just making sure it's "excluded" from any network it was joined to is enough, especially if you actually got it to start pairing (which you did, and that is sometimes the tricky part!). But I guess it can't hurt.
Battery powered devices are only activated for a very short while. During pairing, it may be only 30 seconds before the Zwave radio is switched off. If you initiate the pairing process at the device and then hit the HE pairing button you are losing a few seconds of Zwave radio time. Hit the HE button first and then the device. As @bertabcd1234 said, you may want to try waking up the device. You will need to consult your manual for the magic button press. Hitting the awake button as the Zwave radio get close to its timeout may help.
Thanks, I got it paired by moving even closer (it was only 10 feet away from the hub).
Next question:
Setting up the Hubitat Safety Monitor offers the option to use lights FLASHING as an alert option. This doesn't work with just any light, does it? I have Osram Lightify and Sengled A19 lights but both are not able to flash, even though I can select them within the flashing option. But they just stay off. I guess this feature only works with specific lights?
I think it is a combination of the device exposing the flash capability and the specific driver supporting flash.
As far as I know, there is no flash capability and that action lists all my devices with the switch capability so I'm assuming Rule Machine is using a custom command that they've included in some of their built-in switch drivers.
Since it's not officially part of a capability it probably won't work with most devices...
I know Hue bulbs have a flash capability. I have used custom Zwave drivers that had enabled flash on my GE dimmers. Dimmers normally fade on and off rather than an instant on/off. Flash worked well on those dimmers.
There isn't a flash capability because if there was then only the devices that support flash would be listed in Rule Machine when you select that action, but it's displaying all my Switches instead so that's the capability it must be using the "switch" capability to generate the device list for the flash action.
If they added the command "flash" to the Switch capability then it would work with all the devices that get listed for the flash action, but it doesn't which is why it must be a custom command that's supported by Rule Machine, Hubitat Safety Monitor, and some of the custom drivers, like the Hue bulbs.
Hubitat has the capabilities "Light" and "Bulb" so they should really add the "flash" command to one of those...
I had a similar discussion with Bruce about devices showing up that couldn't do something. His words were to the effect that RM wasn't able or capable of a query.
Here is a discussion about flashing lights and about a device not supporting the flash command. There is also mention of a device with the flash capability. Read the parts about dim ramp. Hue bulbs do support the flash command but I don't know whether HE can or does send the flash command to the Hue bridge.
No, it's officially part of the HSM routines. I have not added anything to it, wouldn't know how to. I'm using Hubitat right out of the box.
Flashing is one option for available lights. The other is just to turn on/off.
I just tried the 3 types of bulbs I have with the flash command in a test rule. None of them would flash. They are ERIA CT and color, Sengled CT and color, and Yeelight CT. Just FYI.
Like I said, there is no flash capability.
Some drivers have a custom command called flash which Hubitat is using with the switch capability.
Because there is no flash capability, there's no easy way for an app to just list the devices that support the flash custom command so the built-in Hubitat apps are using the Switch capability instead.
It's basically trial and error to figure out which drivers support it and which don't.
Just because a device's hardware has the ability to flash doesn't mean that it was implemented in the driver. The opposite is also true because a driver could implement it using a series of on/off commands with delays for devices with hardware that doesn't support flashing.
It would be really nice if Hubitat added a "Flash" capability so that the flash actions in the built-in apps would only list devices with drivers that support it.
You will believe what you are going to believe. If a device doesn't support a flash command you would need to do an on and off less than a second apart. Most devices are incapable of responding to an on/off command that quickly. The ability to flash is at the device level where a single command is issued to flash. The device itself does the flashing.
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