I might have a stupid question, but... How much is to much? My setup is snappy and reliable today, but I wonder if this will this bite me as things grow given all the warnings on the forums.
I have four of these on my network. I see them pop every 30 seconds or so in the ZigBee logs on my C-8.
My HE setup is around 65 devices with 31 on ZigBee. I have a lot of Kasa on LAN with aggressive polling configurations.
The 3R plug driver does take 60% of my device processing time, but I'm at 4% total... Apps add another 2%.
So they are definitely chatty for devices that trigger automations once or twice per day or less, but seen from the hub, everything is fine. The hub sits idle and one message per 30 sec feels reasonable.
The wireshark numbers shared above tell a very different story, but I'm not equipped to sniff my network.
What am I missing? Are my numbers scarrier than I understand? Any other tools/app within HE that could help me see deeper?
Thanks FrankT. I did not mean to "derail" the flow of thought as traffic and workload seem appropriate considerations. As you let me know these will work of my simple needs, I'll withdraw my question, at least for now. Thank you.
Then I tried with @jonathanb's driver and similar. Seems like the new firmware is going to be a nothing burger, but I'll still let everyone know tomorrow if the chattiness is any better.
I updated one to 1001302C and it was a crap storm. I changed type to "Third Reality Switch" to tame it. Not touching it again until someone proves that it behaves. Sad, really.
6 hours after starting the test, I think that I can conclude that it's still ignoring the power reporting parameter. The only viable way to make them act as non-chatty repeaters is to leave the power off on them:
The two "test" plugs are configured identically, both running the new firmware, only difference is that the non-chatty one is powered down and the chatty one is powered up with a laser printer plugged into it that has been in sleep mode most of the time, but still generating lots of "counts."
OK, one last interesting tidbit: about an hour ago, I simply turned the low-count plug on without anything plugged in. So in 6 hours 40 minutes it had generated 82 ZB "Counts". An hour later at 7:40, that number is 388. So even with no load (presumably just the slight voltage fluctuations), it's chatty.
So yeah, these are still a solid "don't use unless you really need power monitoring" plug, but you could safely use them as a repeater if you leave the power switch off even with this latest FW release.
Tried the update, that's my conclusion as well. What I'm seeing:
Plug off : one message every minute
Plug on, no load : one message (0W) every 10 seconds. So the maximum reporting interval is set to 10 seconds, which is not ideal.
Plug on, with load : I see one message every 5 seconds or so (laptop, load varies over time) which leads me to believe the minimum reporting interval is set to 0 and the change in power that triggers a report is set too low (e.g. to 1W or something).
There is no doubt that this device could behave a lot better, however, I would love to better understand the acceptable limits for a device to be considered so "chatty" that it could cause problems.
My opinion is that up to 5-10 of such chatty plugs can not put a healthy Zigbee mesh on its knees.
Though, it is still annoying to see all these reports in the logs. You can use Jonathan's driver, which will hide these frequent updates (although they will still be sent over the air).
It's a pity how an otherwise good product can be ruined by badly designed firmware.
I don't have as much knowledge in terms of ZigBee, but I plugged 4 of these on a network of 45 ZigBee devices for more than a month and I observe exactly that. The network is still very reliable, the hub doesn't seem to sweat but logs are noisy. In fact, I see more improvement from adding repeaters than anything else.
Just got 4 of these plugs before reading this thread. Ugh. They are reporting 0 watts every 30 seconds and can't turn reporting off. Probably going to return them.
I just emailed ThirdReality today. They responded really quickly. They said their current firmware turns off reporting when the power is off. They also said in the next 1-2 months, there should be an update that allows the report frequency to be configured.
For some reason, they said "ideally you want to wait for 1~2 month and do the one time OTA with final SW". Not sure why. Maybe just to avoid updating the firmware twice.
Like many here, I purchased 4 of these plugs a while back. I updated FW but each was as chatty as the next. I ended up disabling all but one of them. The one remaining was used for battery charging and despite the chatter I left it and forgot about it.
Recently I went back to checking the Device Stats and noticed that this plug was not at all chatty or at least nothing of concern. I therefore decided to enable one other plug to see how it compared. Sure enough, the one recently enabled plug was chatty (i.e. 12% busy) as before while the other (2.6% busy) was fine, In many cases, the ratios (approximately 5 to 1) between other stats were similar. So I compared the setting between each plug. Other than being in a different room, powerFactor setting and voltage, everything including FW and softwareBuild was the same.
I have no idea why one is chatty while the other is not.
Are both normally turned on? When the power switch is off, they aren't very chatty at all, it's when they're turned on that you get lots of messages, typically.
Just an update here. Since the time that @ohnit posted this, there have been at least 2 FW updates for these plugs. As of the one I installed yesterday ( 1001303E), the power reporting parameters are still being ignored. It hasn't yet been a month, let alone 2, just sharing my latest experience for those of us watching this.
You can't go out to the web and download firmware like you do for ZW devices. For ZB, Hubitat maintains a database of device firmware and when you click the button, it checks the device's current FW vs what's in the db. If there's a newer version, it installs it.
It should be said that Hubitat's inclusion of the firmware in their database cannot be construed as an endorsement by Hubitat. The FW there is provided by the manufacturers. If the manufacturers forked something up, it could conceivably brick your device (there was a story about this happening not too long ago, thus the pop-up warning was added when hitting the "Update Firmware" button).
I’ve not seen that there are any notifications regarding available updates. Just like @Bullfrog I imagine once in a while I visit the device page, hit « Update Firmware » and look at the logs to see if a new version is available.
I’ve observed the same, latest version still doesn’t allow changing the reporting config
