Zbox Minor Issues - Can they be fixed?

Z-Box
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So don’t get me wrong, I’ve switched from SmartThings, and really haven’t looked back. Just a few quirks, I’m wondering if I’ve overlooked something or setup something wrong.

  1. If an alarm is triggered, right now I can’t find a way to figure out what triggered the alarm? Am I missing something? It seems like it should tell me what sensor triggered the alarm.
  2. I have both a LAN cable and Wifi connected to the hub. Honestly the LAN cable should probably be the primary. However if the Wifi disconnects (I had my APs down for some painting), it shows offline, even though I can connect to it through the LAN cable. It’s like it waits a very long time to search for the internet through the LAN. This switch over doesn’t seem like it works properly.
  3. The app in general always takes 20+ seconds when opened before it can be used (on any device, or connection). Is this just normal / expected behavior?
  4. Door locks, this has always been one of the most frequently used items in our smart home ecosystem. Having it buried in the top bar and not being able to move it is kind cumbersome. Every time we get to the house, it’s wait 20-25 seconds for the app, disarm the alarm, scroll all the way to the right, click door locks, choose the lock we want to open. Is there any way to move these door looks?
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It occurred to me while thinking about this, should I be creating scenes to be notified when these devices are triggered while the alarm is armed? This would solve this, but wow, with many devices, this is going to be a lot of scenes.

Will the box notify me of smoke detectors and leaks, or should I be creating scenes for those too?

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Welcome to the community, @OhioY! Like you did, I converted my home from SmartThings to Z-Box last fall and it’s run very dependably for me since then.

There are official Zooz/Z-Box Support folks who check in here frequently (tagging @Sara) and can/will probably address your points more thoroughly. But in the meantime I’ll comment from my own experience…

My configuration also uses the accessory LAN cable and I never tried the WiFi connection, as LAN had been my intent from the get-go. Additionally, the hub is powered from a POE Switch in the basement on a UPS via a splitter near the hub. So, in my case, without LAN it wouldn’t do anything–although there is the potential to lose the Internet without power being available to the hub, which is a different scenerio.

To piggyback on your question, however, I wonder if there’s a way to completely disable WiFi somewhere in the hub settings? :thinking:

This has always been the case for me, as well. I’m just guessing, but perhaps the app is dumber than one first thinks? In other words, lots more is “served up” to the app from the hub via the Internet portal? (It loads quite slowly on a sketchy Internet connection, which lends some credence to this supposition.)

IIRC, there were some icon changes a while back and some localization issues (how the decimal is displayed: comma (Europe) vs. period (North America) that were fixed by a hub software update. I don’t recall there being a corresponding app update–at least for the iOS implementation–since I’ve been using it. Current version is “1.22.2-zbox-hotfix” according to the app store.

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I’ve thought about removing the Wifi information entirely. Originally I didn’t have it in there, but the documentation and the GUI led me to believe it would be used as a backup. However in practice it seems to being used as a primary (I haven’t actually checked the firewall logs to verify this, just know what happened when I removed the APs)

I have plenty of POE ports, could you elaborate on your setup? I’m using the Zooz LAN adapter, I was under the impression it did not support POE. Is there a Fibaro version or something?

I will definitely agree, the Z-Box has been more stable for me as well. I’ve been overall happy with the switch, just getting these last few items tweaked the way we want them.

The alarm does now identify things, but I went from 45 scenes to 90 scenes this weekend. (Guess it really doesn’t matter though?)

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On the Fibaro hc3 version we can disable the wifi, But the z-box/hc3Lite seems like you cant disable wifi, but disconnect :slight_smile:

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You could make 1 lua scene or 1 QA for each alarmzone to instead of 45 blockscnes to I guess :smiley:

And with the app startup time, If you let it run in the background and disable all powersaving settings on the phone for the app. and if you shutdown all apps, make it a thing to just start the yubii app again. It might help and speed up things.

And for the doorlock, Why not use widgets with scenes to open them? :thinking:

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Hmmm, is there a performance difference between the different types of scenes? It would clean things up to eliminate some of the scenes.

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I am not qualified to tell if it will be any performance difference with lua /block scene :sweat_smile:
But it will be alot cleaner :smiley:
And with QA’s you could add alot of extra functionallity to the alarm system :smiley:

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  1. Z-Box Internet Connection

While the device can technically connect through multiple paths at once, it doesn’t switch between them—your router manages the traffic. However, since the hub’s hardware has limited performance, we recommend using one connection at a time. This can help improve both overall performance and network behavior.

  1. Mobile app

You can fully customize the order of devices shown in the top bar (carousel) and your list of favorite devices. Simply go to the favorites screen in the app, tap the top right corner, and you’ll find options to manage which elements are active, as well as adjust the order within each section (carousel or favorites).

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[quote=“BartekZooz, post:8, topic:487, full:true”]
However, since the hub’s hardware has limited performance, we recommend using one connection at a time. [/quote]

Noted, I’ll disable the Wifi. I do almost wish there was DIY version of this, or a higher end model.

[quote=“BartekZooz, post:8, topic:487, full:true”]
You can fully customize the order of devices shown in the top bar (carousel) and your list of favorite devices. [/quote]

Doh… Not sure how I missed this. I re-ordered them, much better now. Thanks!

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Absolutely cleaner, as @Brors94 mentions! :grin:

As for performance, my experience with Lua in a commercial/military system is that it is a pretty good language for embedded systems, such as the hub. Lua does a certain amount of optimizing when it loads the code–the Lua interpreter loads the source code (exactly what you see when you look at the Lua source code in a scene, for example) and compiles the code at load-time for the target system (in this case the processor internal to the Z-Box hub). It “knows” how to optimize the code for the particular target platform’s processor to make it as efficient as it can–given the logic laid out in the source code.

But more to your point, it takes several scenes written using the block editor to accomplish what can be done in a single Lua scene. For example, consider the common programming paradigm of…

    if op == "1" then
      ...something...
    elseif op == "2" then
      ...something_else...
    elseif op == "3" then
      ...third_something...
    else
      error("invalid operation")
    end

This would take three block scenes, each testing for one of the three values–and would not account for the ‘else’ case at all–unless you wrote a fourth block scene.

So it quickly becomes clear not only is there improved cleanliness, but only one scene is executed instead of three or four–thus the performance increase.

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My setup uses a POE splitter on the Z-Box Hub end of the Ethernet run. In my case the splitter is a TP-Link TL-PoE10R, which has an output voltage selection switch (set for 5v). I built a power splitter with a pigtail from the TP-Link device feeding two USB-A jacks. One supplies power to the Z-Box Hub, the other to a security camera in the same area. I used it for several years on the previous SmartThings hub and now with the Z-Box.

Here’s what it looks like atop some of our kitchen cabinets. The splitter is in the foreground, the Z-Box is sitting on a couple of blocks to raise it above the wire clutter :winking_face_with_tongue: and the camera is beyond that,

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Yes, it would be nice if the Z-Box Hub Ethernet adapter could take POE directly. I don’t know if there’s a Fibaro adapter that does, but I put in a feature request to Zooz to consider something along those lines. Frankly, I’d guess POE users are not the norm in a typical home environment…

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Your comment made me wonder what the state of my Z-Box Hub is, as I never attempted to configure a WiFi connection, @Brors94. So I opened Swagger (I’m far from proficient with it; just poking around from time to time :sweat_smile:) and found a section on Network Settings.

Within that category, there’s a Get command to return list of network interfaces with their configuration.

For my system, it returned the following:

{
  "networkConfig": {
    "eth0": {
      "enabled": true,
      "ipConfig": {
        "dns1": "10.20.10.1",
        "dns2": "8.8.8.8",
        "gateway": "10.20.10.1",
        "ip": "10.20.10.10",
        "ipMode": "static",
        "macAddress": "xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx",
        "mask": "255.255.254.0"
      }
    },
    "wlan0": {
      "enabled": false,
      "ipConfig": {
        "ipMode": "unknown",
        "macAddress": "xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx"
      }
    },
    "wlan1": {
      "enabled": false,
      "ipConfig": {
        "ipMode": "unknown",
        "macAddress": "xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx"
      }
    }
  }
}

From this, it appears only my Ethernet port is active. (MAC addresses are shown, but I removed 'em prior to posting in the forum.) So, I guess I’m good to go for my current setup. :slightly_smiling_face:

There are some PUTs that let one muck around with settings–but I’m not about to mess with a working production system. :innocent:

Perhaps the WiFi interface (one of the wlan interfaces, I beleive) is automatically configured, so that it’s disabled when not configured. Perhaps that turns the radio off, as well, saving a little bit of power…

Again, just speculation…

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I have had the Fibaro HC3 since start of 2020 I think. And it is alot of things I am still learning :sweat_smile:

The possebilities are endless :smiley:

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I would think between APs and security cameras it’s not entirely unheard of either.

I originally added a POE switch for access points here at the house:

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