Feature: Add service to sync NeoStat clocks about heatmiser-for-home-assistant HOT 11 OPEN

hmm, I just enabled NTP on my neohub (in fact I port forwarded NTP requests to my local NTP server on my router). But I guess if you don't want NTP that would be fine...

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What I should have added is that enabling NTP seems to be temporary - it corrects the clock at the time the call is made, but the clock drifts from that point onwards. So I find that I need to call NTP_ON every so often (maybe weekly) to keep it in check.

Oh, and {"NTP_ON": 0} activates NTP, rather than disabling it.

So it's not that I don't want NTP, it seems that this is the method necessary to keep NTP working.

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So it's not that I don't want NTP, it seems that this is the method necessary to keep NTP working.

Hmm, interesting.... My experience was that time is not drifting away when NTP is enabled. If it happens on some hardware then something like this might make sense.

Maybe it's worth asking heatmiser support? They seem to be quite helpful.

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That's a good suggestion - I'll drop them a note. I've started looking more closely at this. I find that my stats are losing something in the order of 10 seconds per day. An inspection of READ_DCB confirms that NTP has stopped after a time (I'm not sure how long it takes).

For example after two or three days:

$ date && python3 ./test-stat.py
Sat 21 Nov 17:04:35 AEDT 2020
json_request: {'READ_DCB': 100} 
json_response: {..., "DSTAUTO":false,"DSTON":false, ..., "NTP":"Stopped", ..., "TIME":"17:04:07","TIMEZONE":10.0,"TIMEZONESTR":"", ...} 

Then I run update DST and activate NTP, and it comes good:

date && python3 ./test-stat.py
Sat 21 Nov 17:05:22 AEDT 2020
json_request: {'MANUAL_DST': 1} 
json_response: {"result":"Updated time"} 
json_request: {'NTP_ON': 0} 
json_response: {"result":"ntp client started"} 
json_request: {'READ_DCB': 100} 
json_response: {..., "DSTAUTO":false,"DSTON":true, ... ,"NTP":"Running", ... ,"TIME":"17:05:04","TIMEZONE":10.0,"TIMEZONESTR":"", ...}

But a few days later, I will find NTP not running and the clocks starting to drift again.

Anyway, I'll come back if / when I get a response.

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Maybe something was setting the time in the meantime?

Messing up with time (e.g. with SET_TIME call) sets NTP into "Stopped" state

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On this occasion, you're probably right - I had been stuffing around a bit, so it's likely that the most recent thing I did was set the time manually in the app. I'll keep an eye on it over the next couple of days. NTP is still running today, and there hasn't been any clock drift. Trick here will be to catch what causes NTP to stop running (apart from me interfering).

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Coming back to this, I think I've got a better idea of what's going on now. First some observations:

• If I touch nothing, NTP runs reliably - at least it has done for the last 2-3 weeks
• Any modification to time in the Heatmiser Neo app causes NTP to stop
• There is no way to restart NTP from the app
• The app provides no method to set / clear daylight savings
• It's possible to set / clear DST through the API and not break NTP

So for geographies with daylight savings, I think we need something in the integration to help manage daylight savings, as there is no way for an ordinary user to do this without breaking NTP (other than sending commands through the API).

My suggestion is to offer a custom service in the integration to set / clear daylight saving as a custom HA service. The HA user could then create an automation to set / clear DST using the custom service in the Heatmiser integration, triggered at the appropriate time.

If we wanted to go a bit further, we could also:

• Offer a custom service to set timezone (GMT offset) - anyone living outside the three app supported timezones is out of luck
• Offer a custom service to start NTP

A better option for the second point might be to routinely start NTP as a hidden API call as part of the DST / timezone custom integration services - just in case the user has messed up NTP by setting the time through the Heatmiser app.

Interested in your thoughts.

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Adding custom service sounds reasonable.

It seems that some other integrations also do that: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/homeassistant/components/ecobee/climate.py#L263

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Nice one - that's a perfect example.

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An ability to set the time would be awesome.
Whenever the thermostat loses connection to the hub, or the hub loses power, the time on the thermostat seems to reset to GST.
Not helpful when I'm in NZ on DST.

Only way to reset it is to go into the app, set the clock to GST (as it still shows NZ in there), wait a few minutes and set it back to NZ again.

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While this is not yet in the MindrustUK code, I used the following workaround. Added it here because it might be usefull for others.

in configuration.yaml add:
shell_command: !include shell_commands.yaml

in shell_commands.yaml add:
neohub_sync_time: echo -e '{"NTP_ON":0}\x00\r' | nc 192.168.88.204 4242

in automations.yaml add:

- id: '1692600497550'
  alias: NeoHub Sync Time
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: time_pattern
    hours: '00'
    minutes: '00'
    seconds: '00'
  condition: []
  action:
  - service: shell_command.neohub_sync_time
    data: {}
    response_variable: neohub_sync_time_response
  mode: single

Have not yet found a way to reset DST time zone back to NZ (am in New Zealand as well). For now, it seems to stick to its NZ value and not fall back to GST.

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