Handling of OFFLINE devices

[cdjackson]

When a light is powered off at the wall, it will obviously not be contactable via Zigbee. However, if the user sends a command to the device, the library will continue to send the command. This will time out after 3 to 8 seconds, but in the meantime it may block communications to other devices. This is because the framework only releases a certain number of commands to the NCP at a time to avoid swamping the network (and the NCP can actually only handle a certain number of commands at once so it is not possible to send more).

If OFFLINE devices are communicated to as part of a large batch of commands (eg 10 devices in a room are powered off) then this may block ONLINE devices for a significant time.

I'm wondering about dropping commands that are sent to OFFLINE devices. This behaviour could be configurable, and for this to work it might be necessary to improve the way the library detects ONLINE / OFFLINE but I open this for comment.

[stale]

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