Dean Roddey
Senior Member
Definitely, on the beaming front, don't buy any battery powered units that don't support beaming at this point. And, for the non-battery powered ones, also get ones that support beaming so that they can act as repeaters for the battery powered ones. And certainly don't buy any that don't support associations.
Our latest Z-Wave driver doesn't support polling, because it's just so unwieldy in the Z-Wave world to do that. It depends on associations for status, except at driver startup where (if possible) it gets initial values from the units (if they aren't non-beaming battery powered units.) It can still do a very slow poll for some stuff that isn't async reported and doesn't require rapid polling, like battery level, but that's it. It doesn't attempt to poll non-reporting units at a rate that would make the status info fresh enough to be of use, because it just puts too much load on the Z-Wave network and any unit that's on the edge in terms of signal quality causes problems.
Our latest Z-Wave driver doesn't support polling, because it's just so unwieldy in the Z-Wave world to do that. It depends on associations for status, except at driver startup where (if possible) it gets initial values from the units (if they aren't non-beaming battery powered units.) It can still do a very slow poll for some stuff that isn't async reported and doesn't require rapid polling, like battery level, but that's it. It doesn't attempt to poll non-reporting units at a rate that would make the status info fresh enough to be of use, because it just puts too much load on the Z-Wave network and any unit that's on the edge in terms of signal quality causes problems.