Ring Keypad G2 -- Compatibility HORROR, don't waste your time

Don't be fooled like I was - the Ring G2 keypad is not worth trying to use with Hubitat, it's a disaster and no one wants to fix it.

No way to use the proximity sensor - if you turn it on, commands from the keypad to hubitat stop working, regardless of what driver I try. Without this you cannot see the system status unless you press a button.

Built in driver - none of the panic buttons work or send any call back to hubitat. If you try the latest community driver the buttons work, but the arming delay on the keypad does not send anything meaningful to HSM in order to get its arming delay started (even if you try a custom attribute in rule machine). So you wait for your arming delay on the keypad, and then the arming delay in HSM starts. No I cannot simply disable that one because I use it when arming HSM from my tablet! It also makes no sense to trust that the keypad will send a command to arm after I have left and the delay has finished counting down.

Really becoming disappointed in the lack of driver support, seems like there are no decent new keypads available that actually fully function with HSM.

Apologies in advance if I missed something, but have you previously posted about the built-in driver not working? I only see your one a couple hours ago about the community driver. I don't think it is fair to declare that nobody wants to fix it if you either haven't asked for help, nor given the community developer more than a couple hours to even read that message.

That said I think we probably could tag support to look at this (or have them pass it on to the person in charge of the driver). You haven't given much to go from in your post above, such as errors in the logs, what have you used to determine the buttons aren't working (States in the device's settings page?), if you have tried multiple apps like button controller or any of the rules engines, and so on.

I would post the following below with the built-in driver selected:

  • Screenshots of logs with debug logging turned on in the device's settings page.
  • Press all buttons in order slowly.
  • Give a narrative for what button you pressed at what timestamp so someone can read the logs and try to reconstruct what happened.
  • Narrow down the logs by filtering to just this device.

I do appreciate your response, but there are numerous threads that I found on these complaints that simply never resulted in any fix.

Maybe I could simplify this by boiling it down to this:

The community driver does not work, and I think I should stick to the built in driver.
Having said that, the built in driver lacks support for any of the panic buttons - pressing them and holding them does not send any info at all to any attribute when using the community driver - I wish it could be fixed. Additionally, the keypad does not light up or show status (armed, disarmed, etc.) when kept on mains power but this is defined by ring as a setting - the driver needs to allow this to be set, but it does not. Finally, alternatively, the proximity sensor also does not allow the keypad to light up or show status because there is no such option in the built-in driver (not to mention it is broken in the community driver). There is no reason for me to post logs or screenshots as these are known issues, nothing for me to prove.

*The proximity issue may be specific to the 'latest' version of the Ring Gen 2 keypad, but this news is over a year old if you search the forum here.

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@acr2001

The built in driver was designed to support basic keypad functions with Hubitat. The panic buttons are not standard functionality as their purpose is to notify a monitoring company of a panic situation. That functionality was added with allot of other functions to the Community driver.

Unfortunately the original person doing the development for the community driver has since walked away from it and because of certain concepts he was pushing for it's use there were some compatibility issues with HSM. One of them is exactly what you mentioned. The development has since been taken over by someone new and it looks like you posted in his thread here.

Taking over someone elses code isn't easy so give him some time.

The proximity issue seems to be related to firmware. So until someone has the time to troubleshoot the issue with how the keypad works it may be hard to fix that. By chance do you use it plugged in or on battery?

I have not reviewed what jkister has in the current driver, but i use a forked version from the previous developer to resolve issue I was having with HSM. If you want to try it and see if that helps you can load it from here.

I did plug the keypad in and even with mains power it will not remain illuminated, nor will any of the status lights.

Having gone back to the built-in driver, I just noticed that any time I arm-away, and then cancel it by entering my code and pressing the disarm button, we have yet another bug. HSM cancels the arming delay - great. The keypad appears to cancel the arming delay and returns to disarmed status - great. 60 seconds later the keypad reports armed (HSM has not armed) and will not allow me to disarm it by entering my code - only by pressing disarm in HSM.

I am returning the keypad and I will install an additional tablet where I had planned to put the keypad - this is too much of a headache. I wish I had the expertise to help the community and fix these bugs, but it is beyond me at this time. I appreciate everyone's help and I hope this is sorted out some day.

I would suggest atleast giving my driver a try.

Allot has changed since the built in driver was released and it certainly has limitation. The original community driver added a bunch of features but also tried to turn the Keypad into kind of it's own alarm system. My driver was focused 100% on enabling HSM to work right with it.

Allot of problems were created by trying to allow the Ring Keypad Gen2 to function as it's own alarm system. Allot of them are about state awareness between the Keypad and HSM, and actions happening in a order that caused bad behaviors. My driver does address them if that is your problem. It also does allot of validation to keep certain things from happening when they should.

The keypad certainly works as I have had mine working with HSM for probably a year now. But i also have had very similar disagreements with the original community developer working on it. This is why i finally forked it and modified it myself.

Ok, trying your driver!
I have excluded the Keypad, factory reset it, and re-included it using SmartStart.
It initialized with your driver at the start. I gave it a code at position 1 to try and test things out. So far, same behavior I started with last time - it is communicating, but any buttons I press on the keypad do not result in anything being sent to the hubitat. Last time, I had to disable the proximity sensor and then wait a while before it began working. Trying this again now and will let you know if I get any further.

Now even with the proximity sensor off, I cannot get the keypad to send any keypress or code entry to the hubitat, yet it will respond to any commands sent to it from the hubitat. My understanding is that Ring updated the firmware and this is the way it behaves now. It reports " FirmwareVersion: 2.0, ProtocolVersion: 7.16, HardwareVersion: 4" in the logs. There are no errors in the logs. No Z-wave errors or issues going on that I can see. Nothing odd in the event logs. Setting the proximity sensor on or off works - I have it set to off right now and it is not triggering.

Changed the driver back to the BROKEN built-in driver.
" 2022-12-18 03:01:46.395 PMerrorgroovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: java.lang.String.call() is applicable for argument types: (java.lang.Integer) values: [2]
Possible solutions: take(int), wait(), any(), wait(long), wait(long, int), charAt(int) on line 108 (method configure)"

Huge thank you to mavrrick58 for updating his driver here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Mavrrick/Hubitat-by-Mavrrick/main/Ring/rkg2_driver so that the keypad properly disarms HSM! This keypad is now usable with his driver.

Remaining problems:
1.) Proximity sensor must be turned off in the driver and then the keypad reset (press reset button on back of keypad once with a pin) otherwise it will not function correctly.
2.) Keypad backlight / status lights do not stay on even if the keypad is on mains power.

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