Zwave Lighting AREAS w/ XSLZW

I've been successfully controlling my Zwave devices with the Elk for a few months now. I'm slowly starting to write more complex rules for my system and recently found that the ALL ON/OFF commands are only for X10, and Areas/Groups need to be setup to have the Elk control a group of lights (i.e. all of them). When using the Leviton VRUSB-1US and the Vizia RF+ Installer Tool software to setup my Zwave network, I did setup Areas. I understand that the Areas/Groups lighting IDs have to be mapped to appropriate Elk Lighting Device numbers (e.g. Zwave group #1 = Elk Lighting Device #129). However, I don't see how I can determine what Zwave group number is given for each particular group/area. Can anyone elaborate on how this is determined?

I assume if I create them sequentially without any errors, they should begin with Group 1, and continue. However, I don't know if that was indeed the case (since the network was configured some time ago) or if Areas/Groups have been deleted. Does the latter end up creating gaps in the Zwave group numbers? Note, the latter really doesn't matter assuming there is some way to determine what group numbers are given; since I HIGHLY doubt I'd ever use all of the group IDs anyway...

I sent an email to Elk today about this and got an initial response, but I guess I didn't convey the issue very well in the first email. Nonetheless, I responded and am looking forward to getting this figured out. I assume with tomorrow being a holiday for most everyone, I may not get this figured out until the 2nd.

Having said that, I did want to elaborate just a bit on the issue. When you use the Vizia RF+ Installer Tool to add lights, thermostats, locks, etc. to the Zwave network they are added in the tree-structure on the left. As each device is added, it is listed in a particular format - "Device Name (X)"... where Device Name is the name that I gave to the device (e.g. Living Room Light), and X is the "Zwave Node ID" (according to the M1XSLZW document) that is automatically assigned to it. When adding these devices to Elk (via Elk RP) the Zwave Node ID then corresponds to the Elk Lighting Device numbers... So Zwave Node ID 1 = Elk Lighting Device 1 (A1).... EASY ENOUGH! The M1XSLZW document goes on to state that when you add Areas, each Area is given a "Zwave Group #", which should also correspond to an Elk Lighting Device number... And, Zwave Group #1, should correspond with Elk Lighting Device # 129. The problem I am having is that the Areas aren't listed in the same syntax ["Area Name (X)"], instead they are just listed as "Area Name", which gives me NO indication of what Zwave Group # was assigned for that particular area. Thus, having no idea what the Zwave Group # is, I have no idea what Elk Lighting Device # to assign each Area to....

I believe that they are sequential. As in area 1 through area 10 are Elk group 1 through Elk group 10.
The Elk groups start at I01 so they would be I01 through I10 (That is a capital i)

That is how I have mine set up. If you get an answere on how to do a All Off I would be really interested. I have not found anything that works for me.

George M said:

I believe that they are sequential. As in area 1 through area 10 are Elk group 1 through Elk group 10.
The Elk groups start at I01 so they would be I01 through I10 (That is a capital i)

That is how I have mine set up. If you get an answere on how to do a All Off I would be really interested. I have not found anything that works for me.

Click to expand...

I totally understand this, but I'm asking how do I know what Area 1 is?

Let me try this another way, here is a screen shot of the Vizia RF+ Installer Tool:



Is the Dining Room Area automatically Area #1, because it's listed first? What if I had created areas before, deleted them, and added others? Is it still sequential?

Regarding ALL OFF, you can see that I setup an Area named All Lights. I simply added all of the lighting devices to that Area. I obviously don't know if it will work yet... at least not until I get the Areas entered into Elk RP. Unless someone tells me that lights can only be a part of one Area/Group... then my plan obviously wont work. Assuming it will, I also plan to make some others such as All Receptacles, and possibly something specific for what lights I'd want on (if any) for doing different things (e.g. coming home)... basically any case that I'd want to control more than a couple lights at a time, I'll probably end up making an Area for. Apparently the issue with using Areas is that even if you are using the Leviton dimmers (which support automatic status updates) they don't report status when activated via a group command. That said, I plan to add in automatic polling after groups are used.

OK, I see what you are asking now. I don't have that answer. I can say that having a lot of lights in a group does not work well for me. Some of the lights will turn off, but others will not. Individually they will all turn on and off correctly. I have 45 Leviton dimmers in my system. I also tried to set up a poll to run after a group command because of not updating status, but was not successful at that either. The command seemed to not run.

So this is an area that I would love to get working better also if you find any solutions from ELK.

Oh yea, very strangely -- Even though the ELK All On / Off is for X10 and i have zwave modules, using C works, but A and B does not.

George M said:

OK, I see what you are asking now. I don't have that answer. I can say that having a lot of lights in a group does not work well for me. Some of the lights will turn off, but others will not. Individually they will all turn on and off correctly. I have 45 Leviton dimmers in my system. I also tried to set up a poll to run after a group command because of not updating status, but was not successful at that either. The command seemed to not run.

So this is an area that I would love to get working better also if you find any solutions from ELK.

Oh yea, very strangely -- Even though the ELK All On / Off is for X10 and i have zwave modules, using C works, but A and B does not.

Click to expand...

Similarly, I've had no issues getting individual lighting commands to work. I currently don't have any devices that currently support Instant Status, and we use them manually quite a bit, so keeping track of status right now is pretty much non-existent. I've been very hesitant to run poll commands on a regular basis - mainly because I have the battery powered locks, and I'm really not sure how much regular polling would effect battery life. However, I currently have my system poll every morning at 0500, and begin some "wake-up" lighting commands beginning at 0630. They've worked every time without fail.

That said, based on your comments, it will be interesting to see if the Areas will work as I'm hoping. I'm also going to try the All OFF via housecode C to see if that also works for my installation. For the most part, I really don't have too many rooms with multiple lights that I'd ever want to control as an Area. Other than the All Lights Area, it's more of controlling a path of lights (such as lights between rooms), and I really only expect to control All Lights at night, as part of a Sleep task, including arming to Stay mode.

I am not sure if this is the best way but I ended up creating groups in the VRCOP directly via the GS command (Group Store). You can do it with hyperterminal or what I did was create a temporary text string in ELK RP and a rule to send it out over the serial port to the VRCOP to get the group to store. I never had much luck in figuring it out withing the Leviton installer tool but that is probably because I didn't try hard enough. So for instance I stored Group #2 with this text string: >N13,14,20GS2^M Which stored nodes 13,13, and 20 as group 2 . So group 2 is now device # 130 in the lighting table of ELK RP. You would do the same type of thing for group 1 = device #129 etc. The only thing is when you use groups within rules and either turn them on or off the status will not update without sending a subsequesnt UP command for it to update the status. This is not necessary with controlling individual lights but only when using groups.

Since there are Elk videos explaining the setup of the VRCOP and the XSLZW, I sent an email to Elk tech support asking about this (also since the setup includes procedures that is specific to Elk programming). Unfortunately, (but somewhat understandingly so) the response I got was to contact Leviton as it's their software which should be providing the Zwave Area IDs....

I sent in an email with Leviton yesterday afternoon... waiting on a response.

It's good to know that I should be able to do it manually as described above, but I've been fairly dynamic with adding devices lately, and really don't want to have to do that way often - particularly if I keep adding devices fairly often.