Hi people,
I am using Homegear with Openhab to operate my max! devices. It works great, however, I am facing duty cycle problems from time to time. It all looks normal (just don’t send to many commands). I would like to know what the current duty cycle is, so I can tell Openhab to limit commands. Is there a way to read the current duty cycle?
Kind regards,
Mark
Hi Mark
Same setup - openHAB, reflashed Cube (I presume or are you using a CUL?), 16 Max! valves, 7 thermostats, 23 devices in total in 14 rooms all controlled by Homegear. Although I do use openHAB and have all my valves and thermostats as items so I can see what’s going on and makes changes to temperatures or Manual / Auto in HABPanel, I also use Node Red (for most of my rule programming in openHAB anyway) and I use firstly JSONata (super-powerful once you get your head round it) and then MQTT (and openHAB’s broker) to go direct to Homegear to program schedules without going via openHAB. That’s the direction I’m heading as I add functionality and I may end up building a UI in Node Red rather than openHAB. I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with Max!, Homegear and openHAB.
You know you can get a version of the CUN firmware that has the 1% duty cycle limit removed and I believe also one that modifies it such that instead of blocking you for an hour and not allowing anything at all when you breach the limit, it recovers constantly so at least half an hour later you will have 1/2% to play with. If you’re brave enough / technically skilled enough you can also rebuild the CUL firmware with whatever limits you want in there (or none).
Now that might technically be illegal, I’m not sure on what the rules are about selling equipment that breaches the 1% limit vs building your own equipment that breaches it. Maybe the rules are there to stop vendors selling equipment to unsuspecting users that hog all the bandwidth. It also depends where you live, what other equipment you or your neighbours might have and how often you feel you need to break the limit. If you’re the only person using 868MHz and you only very occasionally need 1.5% in one hour to re-program all your valves but the rest of the time don’t use very much then you may feel quite comfortable ignoring the limits.
I did quite a bit of research on this when trying to reflash my Cube prompted by the Cube not being able to cope with all my rooms and devices. Since I’ve been running Homegear though everything is going brilliantly.
House warm only in the right places at the right times = reduced heating bills. More importantly, warm house = happy wife!
Hey thanks for your reply. I have 7 radiators and 3 wall thermostats in 6 rooms. I rarely use the UI of openhab. I pick up actions by movement, time change, phone being plugged into the charger at night etc. I mainly use the rule engine and a few custon bash scripts. Max! worked great in openhab if you prevent openhab from changing the settings too offten. I had some rules set up to do that. However, my cube lost all its settings, so I decided to move to a CUL stick and Homegear on docker.
Interesting point about the firmware. I am not that brave, so probably won’t change the firmware.
When I was still using openhab I could get the duty cycle percentage from the cube. I used that to block or delay some changes in temperature. Unfortunaly I can’t find a way to get the same information now. Although I have found some links to how to make it work, but those didn’t work for me. See