[release] Zooz ZSE42 Water Leak XS Sensor driver

I have released a custom driver for the Zooz ZSE42 Water Leak XS Sensor.

The driver supports configuration of all standard aspects of the ZSE42.

The driver is available via HPM or directly via the link below.

Enjoy!

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Can I ask what the low battery alert is?

Here is the parameter description from the Zooz support docs... But if you're asking what that alert actually looks like, that I don't know -- I haven't seen it yet.

I have not seen an implementation of a device's native low battery warning yet on Hubitat. This would be a first. Unless I'm wrong, lol.

I've seen it in some custom drivers, but there's little benefit on Hubitat where you can just see the battery percentage yourself and do whatever you want with that (in case it's actually useful, as it often isn't). That's all this parameter is looking at, and it just sends a special value when the level is below that. A few Z-Wave devices have built-in options like this, which I assume are geared towards simpler hubs/controllers where this information isn't otherwise readily usable directly.

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I'm not sure that's true. I've got Utilitech water sensors and, I believe, a ZCombo that send out low battery warnings, unused by Hubitat. Perhaps this parameter acts that way for Zooz. Perhaps not for other devices.

That setting set the battery % when the device considers the battery to be "low". As @bertabcd1234 said all this does is then instead of sending the exact battery % it sends a special value telling the hub the battery is low. From there it is up to the driver. My drivers I set the % to 1% and then send a WARN level log saying the battery is low. Since on HE is not that useful, you can setup your own alerts based on battery % to tell when when they hit a specific level. If you want to know when it hits the "low" level then have an alert for 1%, but some devices will fail before they ever get to the point so most people set it higher, like 30% maybe.

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So, am I correct in saying that to date Hubitat hasn't used these alerts from the device itself?

My past attempts at notification rules for low battery have failed. I forgot the reason. That's okay though. I'll live. :slight_smile:

What is the Z-Wave command class and relevant arguments that are being sent to the hub by such devices and ignored? Yes, that's a difficult question to answer offhand. :slight_smile: But I'm asking because especially for a device like a smoke detector (though I also saw this with an old Ecolink siren and perhaps their other devices are similar), it's entirely possible that this is an on-device feature that is not exposed via Z-Wave. But if it is, knowing the above (debug logging will show you--it's not an impossible question to answer) is the only way to write a driver that can parse that information.

But it is still unlikely to be related to the above -- again, this parameter doesn't change anything about how the device actually works, just sends a special value in the report when the percent is below what you specified. You don't need that on Hubitat because you can already see the percent yourself (and do whatever, if anything, you want with that information). This may have some use on more limited controllers that don't give you direct access to the actual data, but it doesn't really add much on Hubitat.

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Good question. I haven't hit it on the ZSE42 yet. On some other devices, I've seen the low battery alert level change from reporting an actual percentage value to the low battery value (255).

I've a test underway now which hopefully will drain the battery on the device, and I'll let you know what I see.

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AFAIK all the Zooz devices will send the 0xFF (255) when they hit the designated low battery threshold. That is the entire point of the setting. I just include a catch for that in the code of all battery devices, if they send it then it catches it, if not then no harm done.

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Thanks Jeff, much appreciated.

The test didn't take long. When the threshold is hit, the battery value does indeed flip to a value of 0xFF (255). The code already handles 0xFF, reporting a warning log entry of "Battery is critically low" and posting an event with a battery level of 0.

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