as I also had been having trouble with two of my blinds rarely responding correctly to commands. A prior attempt at investigating this with the iBlinds support had elicited that their firmware design was such that communication hiccups on the Z-Wave could lead the blind to falsely tell the hub that the state had changed when it had not.
The recommendation was that I should upgrade to the latest platform and turn on Z-Wave JS to attempt to get my communication to the blinds more reliable and that this would overcome the firmware state inconsistency. Also that I should tag @bcopeland if I have trouble with Z-Wave JS.
Well, I tried this last night. I ended up spending about an hour forcing interviewing of battery devices by trying to wake them manually (rather than waiting for the natural cycle).
I found that afterwards none of my ten blinds respond to even physical button presses to open/close them. I swapped them out for virtual devices and then excluded and included every one. I used smartstart for this (in case it matters). Now they all will jog open or closed with button presses, but I don't see any state variables – except for one related to the battery – being stored on the device pages, and hub commands to them do nothing. I do see events and logs every half hour that the driver is pulling the battery level.
I'm using the iBlinds Community driver that @bertabcd1234 had created for these.
Looking for advice on what troubleshooting to try next. I'll gladly post logs or the Z-Wave details, but I wasn't sure where to begin grabbing information to share.
If it is what I think it is… It should be an easy fix, but I’m surprised it didn’t come up in beta… I’ll check though and if it is, fix will be out tomorrow..
Today I found that none of the blinds will respond to physical button press again. I don't know why that would be affected by the Z-Wave JS or platform update. Just reporting back and for now I'll stand by for further advice.
Saw/installed (and appreciate) the 2.5.1.143 update. Still struggling to get things working. None of the blinds respond to device page commands. I have one I excluded that I can't seem to include again. I'd like to just figure out how to get one working again and go from there but I'm coming up empty.
I was able to do the inclusion one blind at a time using the traditional inclusion method instead of Smart start and after first shutting down the hub to clear out any lingering Z-Wave stack commands. I now have the blinds responding. Thank you all very much for the help!
So, actually the functionality was short-lived. Found last night that my rule to close the blinds at sunset didn't close any. Manually trying to press any buttons to close wouldn't respond. I had to shutdown and unplug the hub to clear any Z-Wave clutter. Then I could close one blind, but it would lock up again and I'd have to do the shutdown/unplug cycle again. I decided to revert to the legacy Z-Wave.
I do still want to figure this out because I know eventually the legacy Z-Wave option will probably be dropped. So I'm still open to suggestions on how to troubleshoot this @bcopeland
I also still have two blinds that have always given me trouble that seem to have need to route through a repeater because I think the shelving in my pantry is shielding the Z-Wave from reaching them well, but I can't figure out if there is some way to force that routing. Should I reconnect them without authentication? Again, I'm willing to do any troubleshooting.
I've had some issues recently w/two of my iBlinds...I applied the .134 update forgetting that I had one iBlind that had lost connection to the hub and needed to be re-connected. I had a bunch of Z devices that came up pending after the update reboot...a lot of them cleared up when I used the Refresh buttons on the Z-Wave Details page, but many didn't.
I excluded the IBlind that had fallen off and a couple days later everything was back to normal except now another iBlind had fallen off.
On the second iBlnd that fell off a etther one press or three presses on the charger button on the blind had no result, would not open/close or go into exclusion/pairing mode. That was even after I removed the blind from the hub via the Remove button on the Z-Wave Details page.
I had to turn off/turn on the iBlind battery switch to reboot the iBlinds motor, and then the blind re-paired to the hub just fine (I did an exclude first just to be safe). From above it seems like the charger button not working in some instances is probably an iBlinds FW issue, not an HE hub issue...
I have found that an iBlind that wasn't responding and wouldn't restore to functionality via the Refresh button, returned to normal functionality when I simply turned off the iBlind's battery switch for 10s and turned it on again. Back in business. I nice quick resolution.
