Vera Edge Gateway

cyberphox

@nwootton I have a Vera lite which controls 4 light switches, one door lock, garage door opener and one outlet for now through voice commands on my Amazon Echo using the Vera skill. I’ve looked at OpenHAB and HomeAssistant (possibly to install as dockers on my Synology) but wondering what is the benefit of using these?

Nice module by the way!

me2

I’ve got 5 zwave light switches, 8 socket switches, two thermostats, 10 radiator trv’s and heating and hot water controller.

nwootton

@cyberphox Personally I use more than just Z-Wave to control my house. Experience has taught me that the Veralite becomes increasingly unstable when you ask it to deal with too many other plugins or technologies. It’s also costly to implement pure Z-Wave and has gaps in offerings available in the UK.

So I use the Vera to control the Z-wave and let other technologies control their own portfolios. Using OpenHAB I can install the connectors (bindings) that correspond to the different technologies (Z-Wave, BTLE, Hue, Sonos, RFX, Plex, Xiaomi, Weather, Honeywell Heating, Harmony, Onkyo amps etc etc) and then integrate them all together through a single interface.

A Z-Wave door sensor probably costs around £30 in the UK for 1. I got 3 Xiaomi door sensors and the controller hub for £35. Adding temp/humidity sensors at £6 each is also a cheap alternative.

This means I can then write cross technology rules to control the house: If external temperature goes above a certain temperature, set the house heating to eco mode. At bedtime, boost the kids bedroom temperatures, turn on their hues and various fairy lights… and then turn it all off again at lights out. I can integrate presence detection across multiple detectors (Z-Wavre PIR, RFX PIR, BTLE, Wi-Fi) and adjust things accordingly.

You can do the same stuff with Home Assistant. Both platforms have a learning curve (OpenHAB more so), but personally I find it gives me much more options.

cyberphox

@nwootton Thanks for the explanation! So basically right now, I’m using the Vera as the brains, but what I could do is install HomeAssistant to be the brains and the Vera just be the controller for the Z-wave stuff…
Now…I’m about to look further into your alpha module! :)

cyberphox

Cool! Dining room light on, all others off

me2

Looks brilliant. Simple but elegant

nwootton

I added a tweak that I came across while building a different module that means you can now specify multiple device categories. BUT, I’ve not mapped these extra categories to different states.

Basically you can now say show me the Dimmable lights & Switchable lights [2,3] in the new veraCategories part of the config, but it doesn’t differentiate between ON/OFF or a percentage value in between for the dimmable lights.

It also means that you can end up with very long lists of items that take up big chunks of the mirror!

The README in the repo lists the categories.

YMMV.