I've got a bunch of Iris V1 fobs which have 2 buttons and works as a presence device. I want to use them as garage door openers but they are a little slow to rejoin the mesh. Does anybody know how they join the mesh? Does the mesh detect them or do they send out a signal to join. If they send out a signal can one of the buttons be used somehow to force a signal so it can join the mesh quicker?
Battery powered devices don’t leave the mesh, per se. You would have to re-pair them to your hub if they truly “left.”
Many of them go to sleep to save battery power, though.
Iris gen 1 devices are pretty old, and they use a proprietary zigbee profile (for which Hubitat added compatibility to entice former Iris users to jump ship when Lowe’s canned the Iris platform).
But my guess is the device might be prone to falling asleep, and sometimes that first button push wakes it up without actually sending a button-push event.
I had an Iris gen 2 button that used to act like that.
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+1 on a button push speeding up the process of the keyfob being recognized as present.
I see the driver contains a timeout in the driver. I am unfamiliar with presence devices but if I set it to never sleep would this thing eat batteries, or would it behave like any ZigBee sensor?
Usually, a Zigbee presence device “timeout” determines the amount of time it takes for the Hub to decide that the device is “not present”. As long as the device sends a Zigbee message before that timeout expires, the hub will believe the device is “present”, and will then restart the timeout timer.
Thus, I doubt changing that value will have any effect on the battery life of the Zigbee device. Zigbee presence devices just periodically send a status message to the hub when they are connected to the Zigbee mesh.
When they are out of range of the Zigbee mesh, they periodically try to reconnect so they can inform the hub of their “presence”.
Thus, I doubt there is any way to may the device reconnect any quicker, other than adding a Zigbee extender to the outside of your house, to try to allow the device to reconnect while it is still further away from the house.
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Thank you that was very helpful.
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