Feature Request: Notify me if the twine stops talking to the server. (Heartbeat Montior)

Answers

• 20 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
• Tom Mellor

  January 2013 Vote Up1Vote Down

  A heartbeat is a great idea, maybe something like MQTT "last will and testament" message.
• anthony melis

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  I agree. I'm using it to monitor refrigerators and freezers in a restaurant setting. This would be a good feature to make sure it's trustworthy.
• Mark Engelhardt

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Do you have any trouble with getting wifi to work inside the freezers?
• anthony melis

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Wifi is fine. But the twine itself seems to not function well below 20 degrees. I've only had it a day but so far it's not looking like it's going to be a solution. I posted another discussion to see if they are going to tell me what kind of operating temps they've tested the thing at.
  
  My guess is that the batteries themselves don't function well in freezing temperatures.
• anthony melis

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/discharging_at_high_and_low_temperatures
• Mark Engelhardt

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  I looked up the specs on AAA batteries:
  
  Duracell Procell AAA Alkaline: -20°C to 54°C (-4°F to 130°F)
  Energizer Advanced Lithium e2 AAA Lithium: -40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit
  
  How cold is your freezer. Are you getting condensation? The real issue might be waterproofing to keep the frost from damaging things.
• anthony melis

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Actually no condensation, it seems to be working at the moment. Freezers operate from around -10 to +10 F. And sure that's the spec on the batteries, but like the articles point out, the work at varying quality levels throughout the operating range. I can guarantee you at -4 F twine would be bricked because it could not draw enough current out of the batteries.
  
  In the freezer now twine seems to be reading a steady 15 degrees. Works form my needs, but probably not accurate.
• YoYo Pete

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Any possibilities of testing with USB power instead of from battery and see if that gives you better results?
• Bill Spencer

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Don't shoot me, but I think this heartbeat Feature Request has been hijacked. Maybe the cold environment issue should be elsewhere?
• Mark Engelhardt

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Yes, we have left original request behind. Anthony, I think you should post a new request for some cold temp testing/specifications from Super Mechanical -- Hopefully they will respond to my feature request. The Twine is useless if you can't get notification that is silent for too long.
• anthony melis

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Yeah, the link though is that without a heartbeat monitor you don't know what's going on with power issues. They don't seem to care too much about my temperature thread but maybe that's because of the holidays. Thanks.
• John Adler

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  +1 Heartbeat monitor! This would help me to know that my internet possibly went off line. Just need to be able to set frequency of check in and length that the twine hasnt been heard from.
• Jarrod Krug

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  +1.
• Allen Smith

  November 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  A notification when the device reboots would also be nice. My Twine seems to reboot often when a rule should trigger a message and I wind up getting no notification
• Gerry Mueller

  December 2012 Vote Up0Vote Down

  Definitely voting for the "signs of life" feature.
  As for sensing inside freezers, I've posted a solution elsewhere repeatedly - cheap bimetal based thermostat with mercury switch + long wires to break-out board,
• Andrew Southworth

  January 2013 Vote Up0Vote Down

  +1 Heartbeat or some ability to ping from my server. Peace of mind that it is working.
  
  thxs
• Doug Secrist

  May 2013 Vote Up0Vote Down

  +1 Yes, heartbeat monitor feature please.  No news from the Twine for an extended period is often bad news.
• Stacy Olivas

  July 2013 Vote Up0Vote Down

  You could always code something yourself to monitor it.

  
  

  I've actually taken the Vera 3 home automation system, and made a plugin to link the twine to it.  It can be set to poll the twine at a specified interval, saving all the data from the device that is returned (or this can be disabled and manually polled).

  
  

  You could use the plugin and some custom Lua code to do this.

  
  

  
  

  http://community.supermechanical.com/index.php?p=/discussion/472#Item_1
• Doug Secrist

  January 2014 Vote Up0Vote Down

  OK, it's not exactly the server-side Heartbeat Monitor feature/rule we've been asking for, but I found something that'll work for me until SM gives us what we need.  There's an IOS app to monitor Twines and it includes an alert feature that fires if your Twine hasn't been heard from in a couple of hours.  It's not free, but I appreciate the fact that a 3rd party developer is picking up some of the slack here and doing new work around the Twine platform, and I'm OK paying for that.

  
  

  Existing forum thread for the app is over here:

  http://community.supermechanical.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/2040