Device Thresholds: For 'detected' devices as well as 'ground-truth'/dedicated devices

The Dedicated Circuit devices as well as ‘smart plugs’ now allow one to specify a single threshold, with the intent that it denotes a change from “Standby” power consumption to “On” power. The ‘bubble’ only shows when the device is “On” – which is a good thing for clarity of the bubble display.

Two separate, but similar, requests:

  1. Provide similar ‘threshold’ app controls for all devices: detected devices as well as dedicated/ground-truth devices.

  2. Add a 2nd threshold, to help with devices which are more than “binary”. One common example might be a garage door opener with a light. This device has three “states”: On (door mechanism is active), “Passive” or “Idle” (e.g. garage light is still on), and Stand-by (e.g.: light is off & door not moving). The need for this 3rd ‘state’ is that many modern electronic (and perhaps smart) devices have that low ‘vampire’/background power even when they are “off”, and yet the controlled device has multiple states.

Related to this may also be how the thresholds are calculated for analog vs. digital devices.

For example: I have our “automatic vacuum” devices on a smart plug. The power-meter shows a very distinct shift in the “base power” when the device is charging vs. the state where the device is fully charged and sitting idle. The problem is that this is an extremely “noisy” power-meter reading. For example, the “charging” power digitally jumps between, say 14 & 30 watts, while the “idle” state may show digital jumps between 3 & 18 watts. That makes it difficult to choose a simple threshold value between “charging” and “idle” since the ranges overlap.

While that ‘digital power consumption’ doesn’t really cause trouble for device detection (& might actually help), it does make it more difficult to figure out how to specify when the device should “show a bubble”.