No indication of Konnected board being offline

[PeterB]

Hello to all Community members! My two Konnected alarm boards are connected to a Hubitat (hardware V C-8) hub. The Konnected boards communicate with Hubiat via WiFi. In testing the system, I noticed that the Hubiat system will happily arm and indicate that everything is “clean and green” even if one of the Konnected boards is unplugged or otherwise offline. Any suggestions on how to correct this problem and install an app to notify me if a Konnected board is offline? Thank you for any suggestions or guidance!

Regards;
-peter-

[Steve_Kutoroff]

I was very concerned about detecting when my Konnected Pro board board went off-line, which it did once due a forgotten condition long long ago.

I found driver code, “Hubitat Ping” by thebearmay, a long time contributor and possible employee. You use the driver as a virtual device with the IP address of your board. You will need one virtual device and one rule per board.

It will ping the board periodically and report when the pings fail.
It has been a very long time since I set this up, but it works. At least I think it still does, it works silently and I’ve had no problems for a long time. Its actions are in the log.

It can take more than one ping cycle after device recovery for the alert to clear.
I use a ping cycle of 6 minutes in set up in Rule Machine.

If you find a better alternative, let us know.

Cheers and Good Luck.

[PeterB]

Hi Steve, thanks for the lead to Hubitat Ping. I did install it as a driver. Can you please provide any guidance on how to implement it? Thanks!

[dszigeti]

Peter … There can potentially be a lot of problem areas between “communicate via Wi-Fi” and HSM “clean and green”… here are my thoughts.

1. Do the Konnected boards show up correctly in the Hubitat/Apps/Konnected app?
2. Do your door/window contacts/sensors show up in Hubitat/Devices?
3. Does Hubitat/Apps/HSM (Hubitat Safety Monitor) show the Hubitat/Devices door/window contacts/sensors in each of the Intrusion settings (Away/Home/Night)?

Indeed, pinging the Konnected boards will indicate if they are online, however, your statement “unplugged or otherwise offline” seems to indicate that the boards are not going offline intermittently. If they are, then perhaps checking that you have a solid Wi-Fi signal will help. It has been recommended to me (by Konnected) that 80%+ Wi-Fi signal is preferred, although my system often runs at 65% (as far as I can tell). You can use the Hubitat/Apps/Konnected app to see what the signal strength is.

Either executing these steps should fix the problem, or hopefully highlight where your issue is after you report back … I hope this helps.

[Steve_Kutoroff]

As a clarification. My Konnected Pro board is on wired network, so my problems are different from yours. dszigeti (above) makes very good points on WiFi and fixing signal problems may go a long way for you.

For my ping approach, you need to make a new device (maybe virtual, it has been a very long time) from the “Hubitat Ping” device. Mine is:

Then you need a rule via “Rule Machine”.Mine looks like:

The ping and return shows the device is powered and running and on the local network. The log shows the activity when it works.

When it doesn’t, the rule tells you.

I hope this helps.
I got things going on now, I’ll check back on this issue tomorrow AM.

SK!

[PeterB]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I am forced to use WiFi due to the physical locations of my devices. In response to your 3 questions [1] Both Konnected boards show up and behave normally in Hubitat. [2] All contact sensors, motion sensors, etc. are fully functional, and [3] I use HSM daily to arm/disarm the system; all is good. WiFi signal strength on both boards averages 75%.

My system seems stable, and there are no ongoing issues. It was pretty much as “set and forget” installation.

What I noticed is that if I unplug one of my Konnected boards, Hubitat is totally unaware and will arm normally

My goal is just to have a PING running in the background to alert me to the fact that there is an issue.

Regards,
-peter-

[dszigeti]

Peter … thanks for the update … Your explanation makes your situation perfectly clear.

I’ve had plenty of problems with my setup over the years … but I don’t recall having the “disconnect but still functioning” problem. My guess is that when the boards disconnect the Hubitat devices stay in the last state … hence HSM arms as “normal.” Hence the system is not “fail-safe”. Konnected does not sell their system as a “high security, fail-safe system” (my words, not theirs).

So, my assumption that your boards were reliably staying online was incorrect. After numerous Konnected mode disconnects, and talking to Konnected support (Andy … who is very good) we deduced that I needed a higher power WiFi to improved my board’s connection state.

And … you could also revert to Steve_Kutoroff’s suggestion to test (ping) that the Konnected boards are online. From there Hubitat could (probably) be used to set a virtual contact that HSM could use to “fail” the arming process.

I was trying to recall how I might have avoided this situation to-date … but I may also have a fail-bad system. My semi-solution is that I (using HSM) programmed my Hubitat alarm to work like my previous DSC alarm system. That is, I added other functionality. So the following solutions may help.

Solution for add-on board: The main function that comes to mind is that I use the Konnected board Piezo output to beep while the system is arming. This would at least show me that the add-on board was working … but still leaves us with not knowing about the main board’s status.

Solution for main board: Reconfigure one of the contact sensor inputs to an output and use that output to drive a LED “Armed light.” In my case I converted my old DSC alarm panel LED to show “Armed status.”

Or … you could pulse the siren once to indicate armed … a simpler solution. Potentially a little annoying and it might scare the neighbors … but it does test the siren is working.

Or … less reliable … if you normally use a (door) contact sensor during the day, develop a Hubitat rule to monitor that the sensor changes state at 1) least x-times per day or 2) during certain time periods (e.g. not 0100-0600). Publish a warning to your phone if the door fails to open. If you are on vacation, you can ignore the warning.

Hmmm … I might use that last suggestion myself to improve the reliability of my system!

You also might want to sign into the Hubitat forum and change the question to request a “driver based” solution … maybe the Konnected driver can be updated to monitor the board’s status?

I hope this helps.

[PeterB]

Great tips, thank you, Damian. This morning, I connected one LED to each of my two Konnected boards. The LEDs are mounted near my exit point. I used old existing wires from my obsolete ADT system for the leads. When I am arming Hubitat, the LEDs blink, and I know the Konnected boards are alive. If there is no LED, I would be aware that something is amiss!

I think this is adequate for my needs but I am still exploring an hourly PING to each board that would send notification via PushOver.

Ciao!
-peter-

[PeterB]

I’m just circling back to this with the solution I used to solve the issue. After trying several of the suggested ideas, I settled on using the built-in functionality of Rule Machine (RM). I created a rule that pings my Konnected board. The rule returns a packetLoss of 0 if the device responds or 100 if the device is non-responsive. The rule evaluates the result and will notify me via PushOver if the device is down. I create one rule for each of my two boards. The rules run once an hour. It seems like the cleanest solution that relies on Hubitat native functionality without any bespoke coding.

Thank you all for your help. Please contact me if you would like a copy of the rule I created to implement yourself.

Regards,
-peter-

[scubamikejax904]

Hey @PeterB any way you could share how you wrote your rule in rm I’m very interested in setting this up and am having a tough time figuring it out.

[PeterB]

There is certainly a learning curve for Rule Machine. I did a lot of testing before I got things working. I came up with a rule that runs a ping on each of my two boards once an hour. I also wrote a weekly “report” that lets me know that my boards are alive and well. I will do the best I can here to outline the steps I took.

[1] Install Rule Machine and create a new rule to ping one of your connected boards. I kept things simple and created one rule for each board rather than creating a complex if/then/else statement. I am a firm believer in keeping things simple when possible.

[2] On the page for your new rule, click the Local Variables table to create a new Local Variable by clicking the “+” sign. Name it anything you want. Here I used the name of PingValue02 as a number with a value of “0”

Here is how the variable is displayed in Hubitat.

[3] Create the necessary actions by clicking the Define Actions link;

[4] The first action is PING. You find PING under “Send Message…”

[5] Create the second action to set the value of the Local Variable.

Note: When you ping a device the resulting data shows a packetLoss of “0” if successful or packetLoss of “100” if it fails. This is the value that drives the logic of this rule.

[6] Create the next action to test the results of the ping. Be careful to use the slider for “NOT the Condition” as shown in the image.

[7] Create an action to notify yourself if the event is triggered.

[8] Be sure to click the END IF button.

[9] Schedule the rule with the Trigger Events. I run my rule once an hour.
TEST, TEST, TEST. Use at the logs to see the results. Test using a known good and known bad IP address. You should conduct further testing by disconnecting the board to see if the rule is triggered.

Once I had this under control, I took it a step further and created a “report” that runs once a week to let me know if the board was alive and well. I wrote another rule using reverse logic.

Hope this helps. Good luck.
-peter-

[scubamikejax904]

This was a huge help Thank you