alarmdecoder.com

Hi,

I received my new AD2USB a few days ago and connected it to my Ademco Vista 4140XMPT2 panel. The issue I'm having is the way that it reports my zones' state. All of my zones are connected to the polling loop, via expanders (4208U). Please see the attached image, this is what I get in the logs of the webapp. As a consequence, my Home Assistant instance where I've configured the AD2USB, does not accurately reflect the zones' state. For instance a window contact that should show as open (because the window is open), shows as closed most of the time and only switches to "open" for a second every 5-6 seconds or so. Am I missing something? Is this how it is supposed to work?

Thank you in advance for your assistance

This is just how the panel reports zone faults unfortunately. This is why we added time delay to notifications so we don't get spammed by open/close events.

The Home Assistant integration might want to implement some logic for zones...

Hi Kevin,

thank you for getting back to me so quickly. A few additional questions:

1. Is this behavior specific to my/some Ademco panels, or do all panels report zone status this way?
2. Is this behavior specific to zones connected to the polling loop, or is that not relevant?

Thanks

It happens on all of the ademco panels (including my 21ip) as far as I know

Don't think it depends on zone, my hardwired ones do this when they are in reporting state (not armed)

Reading up on zone expanders, it seems that my alarm uses the 4208U expanders, which are V-Plex loop expanders. Could that be the reason for the behavior I'm seeing, as opposed to the behavior other users are seeing (who are using Vista 20P or similar panels)?

If that's the case, is there anything I can do to "remedy" this? I've seen in the firmware release notes that you're building a feature to allow tapping into the V-Plex bus. Can you provide more details on this?

Thanks

Sorry, this has nothing to do with the vplex bus. This is how the alarm reports the zones - it even does it this way on my vista 21ip panel. It is annoying, but there are software workarounds that can be done.

Hi again Kevin,

I'm sorry for being a pain, but I just can't get my head around this. Please see below a comment on the Home Assistant forum from another user of AlarmDecoder:

Weird. My logs (Vista 20P, 1 partition, 4 hardwired zones, 16 wireless zones via 6160RF module) don’t show anything like that. I see exactly what you’d expect - zone faults when they open, restores when they close. As far as I can see, there are no extra entries. Of course the Vista 4140 could be different - maybe the panel firmware is the issue.

According to your comments, he shouldn't be seeing this behavior...

Another user says:

I have a VISTA-20P with three expansion boards and cellular module. Open is open, closed is closed.

So either I'm missing something, or their panels report events in a different way?

Thanks again for your support

It only does it for my motions and rf wireless zones, so maybe there's something there.

Either way, the software on this side isn't going to change in this regard as it accommodates this in its notification system and it is designed to report what the panel reports regardless.