Feature request | VOC threshold setting

[divad-de]

Hi Tvalley71,

thanks a lot for your great work! I am currently transitioning from Homey to Home Assistant and found your Pluggit implementation very useful.

There is just one feature, that is missing from my point of view: the setting of the 'VOC sensibility' for 'Low' 'Medium' and 'High' (this is described on pages 42/43 of the Pluggit Modbus documentation) in one of your 'Set Configuration' pages.
I personally use this to have different sensibility settings during the day and night. Before I was able to controll the pluggit device via automations I just used the built in night mode in the app, but that was just stupidly applying fan level 2 at night and not making use of my built in humidity and VOC sensors.
On the other hand my day VOC settings are 'too sensible' and I don't want Pluggit to change the fan level to 3 or 4 because the VOC levels are rising during the night and disturb our nights.
That's why setting of the VOC sensibility twice a day comes in handy!

In Homey I was able to control this by writing to:
40563 for the Low Treshold of VOC (ppm)
40565 for the Middle Treshold of VOC (ppm)
40567 for the High Treshold of VOC (ppm)

In Homey there is an offset of -1, hence the holding registers were 562, 564 and 566. Additionally the actual value I want to transfer to Pluggit needs to be multiplied by 65536 (VOC level of 800 --> 52428800).

Thanks a lot in advance!
divad-de

[Tvalley71]

Hi @divad-de
I'm glad you like the integration.

I will take a look at implementing the VOC sensitivity settings. I personally don't have a VOC sensor, so I may need your help testing it eventually.

I use the calendar function to set Level 2 during nighttime.

Best regards and many thanks for the coffee :-)
Tvalley71

[divad-de]

Thanks for the fast reply @Tvalley71!

Happy to be your tester.

Best divad-de

[Tvalley71]

@divad-de,
If you enable Pre-releases for the Pluggit integration in HACS, you can install a pre-release that includes the Air Quality Thresholds.
Let me know what you think.
Tvalley71

[divad-de]

Thanks a lot for such a fast turnaround @Tvalley71!
As I am currently travelling I will not be able to test the pre-release until end of next week. I'll let you know then!
divad-de

[divad-de]

Hey @Tvalley71 due to the bad weather I was able to give the pre-release a go remotely. I am able to read the current levels in my Homey setup that are being written by HA and the values match the ones I use within Homey. So the setting of the threshold levels seems to work! Thanks! Only the translation of the new 'set configuration' points is off in German.

Two questions regarding how your integration deals with errors as I would like to add an error notification into my HA automations:

• Does 'pluggit.set_configuration' throw a response back to HA, and if yes in which format?
• How does your integration deal with an error? Does it throw back an exception or an error status?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Tvalley71]

Hi @divad-de

Thanks for testing the pre-release and for the feedback!

Regarding the German translations, you’re very welcome to suggest improvements to the language files. You can find the German translation file here.

Initially, the languages other than English and Danish were added because another user requested them and translated the English language file at that time. Later additions and changes to the translation files have mostly been assisted by AI (GitHub Copilot), so there may definitely be places where the wording can be improved.

Error handling

I believe the ability to react to errors in Home Assistant automations is relatively new, possibly introduced in this month’s release — so I’m not entirely sure how it works yet. Prior to this release, the execution of an automation would stop if an error occurred, but now it should be possible to “continue on error.” This is based on what I’ve seen in the release notes.

The integration throws exceptions when something goes wrong.

Most of the errors that propagate back to the UI (and therefore potentially to automations) are typically validation-related issues such as:

formatting errors

invalid input values

range validation errors

You can see my own defined exceptions here.

The translations for these are also included in the translation files. In addition, some of Home Assistant’s own exceptions may also be raised.

When an action such as pluggit.set_configuration is executed, it is first validated and any exceptions like the above may be raised. If validation passes, the action is added to an execution queue. This queue is handled by a Home Assistant Coordinator, which manages communication with the device and ensures that requests are processed sequentially.

Read/write errors that occur during Modbus communication inside the coordinator are asynchronous and are not returned to the UI or automations. Instead, they are logged in the Home Assistant log.

If the coordinator repeatedly fails to communicate with the device, it will eventually be marked as unavailable, but I’m not entirely certain how Home Assistant internally propagates that state back to the UI and automations in that situation.

In case of an alarm from the device itself (register 40517), the integration will send a notification to Home Assistant’s notification area, or when the filter lifetime reaches zero.

I hope it answers some of your questions.

Tvalley71