Currently you only get an information when the Battery life is reaching its limit when using the app.
It would be good to have a better system to allow you to monitor the battery life and/or get an active notificaiton (i.e. email).
Features
Allow Monitoring by providing an API call that returns i.e. the % of the battery left (or an estimate in number of “lock operations”).
In addition it would be good to ad some kind of push request (i.e. email or rest call) either using nuki web to notify when the battery is getting low.
Reason
It happened already, that the notification bell in the app got unnoticed and the battery ran out. also if you use the FOB you dont see any notification
Examples
Receive E-Mail: change battery
Integrate nuki in my monitoring server
Allow research which battery-type works best
A short update from our side, as this is clearly the most-wanted feature atm!
We are planning to include battery-warning(-option)s in ALL the possible channels. (Some are already in the work and some will need more time.)
% left is a whole different story though…
Due to our decision to make the Smart Lock working with any standard AA-battery, easily available at every store, the exact specifications of the batteries used are not available to us.
Even with battery types suggested by us the performance is never linear (nor 100% consistent between batteries from the same brand/type) and very strongly dependent on external influences.
Just compare how trustworthy the battery left % of your 2 year old smartphone is, where they have one standard battery per device.
So best we can do is estimate when lifetime will be ending soon and give warnings for that (like we do atm).
Hi Stephan, I have Netatmo Weather Station at home. The temperature and rain sensors have standard AA batteries. It does show a battery state. How is this possible?
Showing something like
“You used your device for 3 months now; should work perfectly fine for another 9 months.”
for a low power, non-critical device with very linear power-consumption, sounds like a perfectly fine user-experience for me.
But I hope you are not seriously comparing this to a retrofit motorized Smart Lock with very non-linear power consumption with high peak-demands, heavily depending on external factors.
What can really kill the user experience here is the difficulty of extrapolating from past numbers to future numbers in our usecase.
E.g. your Smart Lock worked just fine for 4 months in summer/autumn (and could work for another 4 months with same usage/conditions), but as it gets colder your door starts to jam more often and the motor gets a load more work to open the lock. Just locking 2 times in a row quickly could cause a jump from “50%” to “please exchange your batteries asap”. Why? Bc. new ones will have less problems to handle the extra stress and will work more reliably. (Considering you don’t want to get locked out due to empty batteries. )
Would this be a good user experience? We don’t think so and that’s why we are hesitant to implement such a feature.
What’s going on with the warnings over web?
Actually it seems that the bridge will get no automatic info from the Samrtlock, when the Battery goes into a critical state. You will not receive a correct message with the /list command until you send a direct request to the Smartlock. In worst case the battery is empty in the meantime. Quite hard to check the state under this circumstances in a Smarthome.
Battery state was critical but not shown so in the /list command?
Or did battery state critical not occur at all and batteries still were empty?
I will try to reproduce this, but it’s always a bit tricky to do.
But as the power of the battery is “only” used during opening cycles it would be nice to see something like the open-circuit voltage , OCV, during NUKi idling. And then show the voltage drop during activation. This should give an idea, how well the batteries are actually performing. This algorithm works with all AA cells on the market.
@ekkehard Try tapping 7 times on the info text at the Battery type screen to get some details which may be what you are looking for (mainly built for debugging from our side and hidden for standard users to not confuse them).
I understand the complexity of trying to estimate the remaining capacity of the batteries during operations from different manufacturers. So I provide the following for information and hopefully help towards finding a solution.
I recently purchased an Orbit B-hyve Smart Hose Valve Timer with Wifi Hub which operates in a very similar way to the Nuki Smart Lock with the Bridge. The timer is powered by 2 x AA batteries and the B-hyve App seems to be able to provide an estimate of the battery capacity percentage in the App (see attached screen-shot of the App running on my phone).
Perhaps Nuki can reach out to Orbit to see if collaboration is possible since your products are very similar.
After quite some effort we are finally able to provide this as an experimental feature with Bridge API for the current Bridge firmware Beta and Homekit.
