Vista TPI suggestion: send current status to new connections

[koreth]

It would be great if the Envisalink would always send 01 and 02 messages (zone and partition status) immediately when a new connection is established and authenticated. Or alternately, if there were a command I could send to poll for the current zone and partition status.

Right now those messages are much less useful to my application than they could be because if there is already an active fault when I connect to the Envisalink, the only way I can find out about it is by parsing the text of incoming 00 update messages. If there's more than one fault, I have to wait for however long it takes to cycle through all the fault messages. That can take a while on a hot day when there are lots of doors and windows open.

If I have to parse the fault text to figure out the state of the world anyway, it seems like the 01 and 02 messages aren't buying me much aside from saving me from having to maintain a timer to expire faults I haven't seen in a while. But if the Envisalink sent the current state of the panel as soon as I connected, I could use the bitmasks in those messages to reliably initialize my application.

One workaround is to scrape the web UI and parse the "Zone Status" table HTML, but I'm not nuts about that idea, not least because the web UI could change in a future software update.

[Cobra]

You don't mention which version of TPI you are using. Is it Honeywell or DSC? For the DSC TPI, I would expect you to send a 001 ' Status Report' command on new connections. This reports all current (known) status back to you over the interface.

I took a look at the Honeywell doc, and see what you mean. The reporting seems to be limited by Honeywell panels quite a bit.

[koreth]

Yes, sorry, good point. I'm using the Honeywell TPI on an Envisalink 4 running firmware 01.00.69A. My panel is a Vista 21iP. I've edited the topic title to make that clear.

I understand the Honeywell is a pretty dumb panel, but clearly the Envisalink is tracking the state of all the zones since I can connect to its web interface and the zone status table is correctly populated. So in theory it should be possible for it to send the status either automatically or on demand over the TPI, or at least I'd think so.

[GrandWizard]

Just ask for a zone timer dump upon connection. You won't get partition state but you will have all of the zone states.

[koreth]

That seems like it should get me most of the way; I hadn't taken the time to really look at that output before. Just to confirm what seems to be happening: those timers get reset to 0xFFFF every time a zone is mentioned in a keypad display update, correct?

I still think it'd be nice to be able to request current zone+partition state in the more compact formats, but the timer dump is at least a better solution than waiting for updates.

Thanks!