Understanding the HE poller app

So I have some of these old GE/Jasco non-zwave plus dimmers. I was having the dashboard not updating issues (on physical presses) after moving the device from ST to HE. After reading through the forums, I found the polling situation on these older devices. So my question is, does the poller app actually work? I am on the C7 hub that I just bought. I set it up to poll this dimmer and it says polling in the app screen, but I never see it log an event or the state of the device change. I then went and installed rule machine and created a quick rule to do the polling every 5 minutes on the device and that seems to work. Am I missing something with the poller app? Does it just enable rule machine or is it suppose to do the polling at some set interval (which from what I can tell can't be configured).

Thanks for any pointers in my new journey from ST to HE.

I can't remember for sure, but I think the poller app polled selected devices every 15 seconds. When I still had some non-plus devices I used Rule Machine instead for the ability to configure the polling interval. You could definitely poll more frequently than 5 minutes if need be. I had mine configured to poll between 30 seconds and 1 minute depending on time of day. Still not the same as instantly. SmartThings polls everything as far as I know, even plus devices, but they don't have the overhead of running everything local.

Thanks for the feedback. Since its a built in app, I might file a support request to see what they say regarding the poller not working. I will definitely change my RM rule to be a lower interval. I was hesitant to do that because I read in different places that it could cause unnecessary load on the z-wave network. I am guessing since ST does this, its not really load on the network but on the hub itself as you mentioned.

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The load is on the Mesh. The CPU is a million times faster than the Mesh. But for SmartThings, with everything 'paced' by the rate at which the Cloud can generate reactions, there's big gaps of time available between "the good stuff" for poll cycles to seem invisible. Most of us have our Hubitat Hub doing everything that a vast array of cloud servers were once doing for us.

I KNOW I'm doing more with my hubs than I ever did in my SmartThings days.

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The poller app does have some issues; it works for a while then just silently dies. It's easy enough (and more flexible) to use another app like RM. I use WebCoRE for polling my four non-Plus dimmers with a 15 second interval; it hasn't caused me any problems, but I don't use a lot of Z-Wave in my network.

I always wondered why these switches always seemed to register their status so quickly (sometimes it seemed instantly) when I had them on SmartThings. Turns out that SmartThings polling for GE/Jasco and similar devices is actually pretty clever; it takes advantage of the broadcast that these switches generate for every paddle press (normally used for inclusion/exclusion). Though SmartThings has a nominal 10 second polling cycle for each device, if the ST hub is in range of one of these node info broadcasts when the switch is operated, that switch gets moved to the top of the polling cycle so the status change may be registered quicker than the normal polling interval would have allowed.

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Wonder if this could be done in HE? So instead of just polling on interval wait for the broadcast and then update that units status. Just wondering. I have several non plus switches I took out of service but would be nice to use them somewhere rather than keep buying new ones.

It could work, but the node info broadcasts would have to be within direct radio range of the hub (switches not in range still need to rely on the regular polling interval). SmartThing's Z-Wave radio seems to be a bit more sensitive than HE's (at least this seems to be true for versions prior to the C-7) so it may be more practical in that environment.

Well I'm currently switching over from Nexia, and have a whole house full of non Zwave plus switches, so polling all the time was/is not an option. But I was determined since Nexia was able to support that in their App. So I wondered how could that be, I doubt they were polling all the time as they are a cloud based service. But then it hit me the polling happens on the UI and thus you an never see(or at least for long) the device in an unrefreshed state since it refreshes as soon as one looks at the UI containing that device.

So with that idea I turned on Maker API and tried using it to poll my switch and then added that URL as an image Tile on the UI and.... it worked as expected!

So now that it works, I will come up with some code that will poll capable devices already in Groups created by the Groups and Scenes App and add that to the UI dashboard screens in image Tiles.

But it might be a better idea to somehow make the UI automatically poll devices on a given dashboard if configured, to allow more performant polling.

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