I have come to the conclusion from my own experiences and reading the forum that many of the things I’m seeing are chimeras, created by UI7.
I have cases, many intermittent, of devices showing “Can’t detect device” when in fact they are working properly. Tech Support confirms this is a UI bug
I often find that a device will not respond to the Poll or the Stress Test and yet is working fine. I found this the other day with a sensor in the streetside mailbox about 75 feet from Vera. It worked fine and responded to poll and stress when first re-installed. A few hours later it wouldn’t respond and yet when the mail was delivered it tripped exactly as intended.
The Smoke Detectors many of which reflected “Can’t detect device” or “Waiting for wakeup…” all cleared with no action on my part and are working fine. I have code running in PLEG to check the “LastWakeup” and if a smoke detector missed two wakeup cycles it flags it as down. So far every device is waking fine on the expected time as reflected in the Device Properties in PLEG.
I still have questions about the Power Fail Sensor and the Front Door Bell Sensor but they are not urgent items.
Like many people I think UI7 is far from the ideal. Its a bit distressing to find that it has been in the field this long and is still in such a poor state. I’m hard pressed to see what it does for anyone that could not have been backed into UI5. ZWave+ could certainly have been retrofitted to UI5.
The radically reduced device name length in UI7 is a pain.
I’m continue to get some random Restarts which I understand may be related to 1.7.2044.
The VeraPlus is a big performance gain on Vera3. Both my Vera3 units were running 95+ % Memory and 15-30% CPU. VeraPlus has brought that down to 60% Memory and 2-7% CPU. Everything works more crisply, walk into a motion detected room and the lights are on instantly. Open a detected door and the lights are on before the door is fully open.
Kudos also to the Plug In developers. The new PLEG/VeraAlerts Editor is a delight to use. All the other Plug Ins I use are working fine with the minor exception of not being able to change the button names.
Since they weren’t working anyway in 1.7.2044, I removed almost all my Notifications (except for things like device battery level messages, etc.,) and implemented them all in PLEG Logic Actions to SendAlert via VeraAlerts per Richard Schaefer. Its much more flexible and can actually be easily edited, unlike the Notifications that have to be deleted and reentered.
I hate the fact that they put the LEDs on the top of the VeraPlus. I have mine sitting on top of a tall bookcase in the Family Room, which is just about the central point of the house. The Vera3 sat one on top of the other and the LEDs were easily visible so it was quick to see if there was a operational problem. I’m looking into a way to mount the VeraPlus units standing on their fronts, side-by-side so the LEDs are visible.
Once I get these two VeraPlus units settled down I’m going to replace the VeraLite that runs the BlueIris Camera PlugIn with one of the now-unused Vera3 units. Should make that a bit crisper and hopefully it will track the cameras more closely.
