ControlThink Forums

Hi Chris Using ControlThink SDK that provides PollEnabled/PollInterval facility for polling individual devices, I would like to know some points:- 1] How much minimum value can we assign to the PollInterval? Please justify your view too? Also to see the situation when we need to poll more than one device say 10 devices that includes applicance modules, dimmer thermostat ? 2] As we know certain devices will inform the usb stick regarding their status whenever there occurs any change, so I would like to know can we determine via our SDK that a particular device supports auto informaing the status or not and if not then only our application should set the PollEnabled/PollInterval settings for that device. Simply stating I want to set up the polling only for those devices for which we need to explicitly do it and not in cases where auto informing feature is there Thanks Arnie

There's no standard way of knowing if devices support any kind of auto-sync in Z-Wave, unfortunately.

The minimum polling interval is 1 second.  Anything below that will not poll any faster...  That may change in the future when used with 40kbps devices.

Chris

Does using a poll interval of say  second not cause any network congestion problem? In what case do we have network congestion:-

- Having large no. of devices or,

- Polling the devices frequently [say ] second or less

 

Also does the SDK pauses for some time in between with no polling at all? If yes then how long is the pause and for what number of times?

 

Arnie

Arnie,

Z-Wave is a low-bandwidth protocol, so having one machine poll devices with a second pause between polls is no big deal.  Having 16 computers doing it will cause network congestion.  There's no magic bullet, but we typically recommend polling devices every few minutes when necessary and tweaking to suit your particular circumstance.

Chris

Keeping a pause is OK and also necessary in order to avoid network congestion, but what you will do if one is required to also handle user created routines i.e. to carry out some action based on a dimming or detect motion because in that case you will definitely not using minute(s) delayed polling.

 

Arnie

If you need to do "manual polling" outside of the standard background polling, just request the device property in question anytime.

Chris