Migration Vera to HA > how to send sensor data from Vera to HA?

[DesT]

@sammy2 old vera user too, i moved to z-way (https://z-wave.me/) AND i'm using openLuup from @akbooer to bridge to z-way and have the same plugin as on Vera.

I'm running that setup for the last 4-5 years.

[toggledbits]

Reactor (Multi-Hub) has an importer for your Vera Reactor Plugin rules, if that's of any help to you. You can then migrate your devices to HA/ZWaveJS as they fail or when you have a notion to do one here and there. My own home currently has three ZWave meshes, Vera, HA, and Hubitat, but I have to test Reactor so spreading my devices around makes sense for me. Your old Vera will be very happy being just a radio for a long time.

[therealdb]

I still have my Vera as a radio hub. I'll start soon a new zwavejs hub to address new zwave devices not supported and a couple of battery ones having problem, to build a good mesh. You'll be OK in both cases.

Take a look at how to decouple your Vera from the cloud.
Reactor will surely help.

[a-lurker]

I've got a lot of Zwave devices inside walls, so I'm being using a Vera Edge as a Zwave radio bridged to openLuup. Works perfectly once you move everything else to openLuup. Just leave the thermostats on Vera and bridge to openLuup. Makes the transition a lot easier.

Hoping to see Zwavejs talking to openLuup via MQTT one day. It's certainly possible. In the interim it wouldn't be too hard to set up a couple of Zwave devices using the Virtual Devices plugin but thermostats may be a bit tricky.

Also got ZigBee2MQTT talking to openLuup (mainly Hue devices) and some Shellies - all works nicely. You can also use Reactor with it.

You can read the openLuup info here.

[Pabla]

I made the switch from Vera to Home Assistant a few years ago and NEVER looked back. Main things that helped was using the Vera integration in HA that allowed me to control the devices that I hadn't already migrated over to HA. Also MSR ability to import Vera's Reactor config was massive and saved me a ton of time. Bit by bit I brought things over to HA.

I do recommend starting your Z wave network from scratch using Z Wave JS UI in HA so you have a nice fresh start and can take advantage of newer and better supported z wave networks.

As for what you should run HA on I would skip running it on any sort of SBC. Instead something like a NUC would be great and nowadays you can pick up a mini PC for a ~$100 used. It will do you fine and give you plenty of headroom in the future should you want to grow your setup. You can either run HA in docker that way you can run MSR and anything else on the same HW or run it using HA OS and then run MSR (unsupported) as an add-on. I preferred to run HA OS so I used my Odroid N2+ that I had kicking around to run Linux so that I could run anything else I wanted on the side.

Once you make the switch you will realize how much you've been missing out on!

[CatmanV2]

I too moved away from Vera (got me banned!) and now run Z-wave, OpenLuup, MSR and Mosquitto on a NUC such as yours. Also have Home Assistant for some other integrations. HA runs on a Pi3B
FWIW my view is that HA is not, on its own, a replacement for Vera + Reactor. (Although it might be for Vera alone)

As others imply, step away from Vera and you will never look back.

C

[toggledbits]

@Pabla said in Migrating from Vera Plus to Home Assistant (or other?):

I do recommend starting your Z wave network from scratch using Z Wave JS UI in HA so you have a nice fresh start and can take advantage of newer and better supported z wave networks.

I would go ZWaveJSController to directly interface Reactor to ZWaveJS. HA dumbs some of the ZWave stuff down a little too much for my taste, so even though I'm using HA and still see its version of my ZWave mesh devices, I use ZWaveJSController for the direct access to ZWaveJS and do most of my ZWave device access and control directly.

[sammy2]

Sorry I've not posted back yet..
Lot's of suggestions here. Keep in mind the last thing I programed was something in college decades ago in Fortran so I don't know any of the current languages. I need something dumbed down and preferably graphics based.

I actually have a HomeSeer Smart Stick + actually, Model number SA 370-2, 908.42 MHz (Said G3 in my initial post) and would like to use my NUC for the controller but for whatever reason it is packed away and I cannot find it.

Can I start on my Ryzen 3700x and then migrate it over to the NUC when I dig it out of storage?

I'm thinking HA might be more for me because I need it dumbed down a bit but where to start? Links?

[Pabla]

@sammy2 Yes migrating HA setups is not difficult! HA setup nowadays is more GUI based so you won't have to deal with much code. Setting up MSR you will have to but its very basic straightforward stuff and a lot of useful info is available on the docs. Plus we're all here to help!

[akbooer]

No, really, no coding required these days.

Although if you did want to dip your toe in, I’d certainly recommend Lua, which is what Vera (and openLuup) plugins use. It’s modern, but not a difficult move from Fortran (which is what I cut my teeth on when at school.)

[mrFarmer]

Hi, instead of full DYI I switched to Hubitat. Nice thing is that MSR supports both Vera and Hubitat so you can migrate in phases. I'm running MSR in Docker on a NAS. I added HA for some integrations that do not exist for Hubitat, also using docker, and also linked with MSR. Last I use openLuup to run some plugins that came from Vera and have not found good replacements for. All logic that is complex or needs more than one platform sits in MSR.
When you move a (zwave) device from Vera to Hubitat (or HA) it is just a matter of changing to old device to the new in MSR rules and the wife does not even notice

For fun I also added InfluxDB and Grafana and am now learning to build some nice dashboard as a sort of datamine replacement. Using MSR you can feed Influx form any of the connected systems. HA and Hubitat have InfluxDB connections.

As you see, many options to ditch Vera.

Cheers Rene

[sammy2]

Sorry guys.. Been working 60 hour weeks currently so I've been back burnering this!

At any rate, I think I'm going to go with HA and am still looking for answers to these questions:

I actually have a HomeSeer Smart Stick + actually, Model number SA 370-2, 908.42 MHz (Said G3 in my initial post) and would like to use my NUC for the controller but for whatever reason it is packed away and I cannot find it.

Can I start on my Ryzen 3700x and then migrate it over to the NUC when I dig it out of storage?

I think though I might want to find the NUC because I thought I read a few weeks ago to run HA on an intel PC, there's a HA (Linux?) os and the NUC would need to be formatted. I'm not going to do that with my everyday work horse and media server!

[Pabla]

@sammy2 I would install HA using a virtual machine on your windows device. Then once you find your NUC install HA OS on it. This is all assuming you intend to run HA OS. Take a look at this page to see your options for install types. Backup and restore from the same install type is no problem.

[CatmanV2]

@Pabla this is exactly what I did. Worked like a charm, although a little nerve wracking do to the lack of progress bars. It takes a while as well

Swapped the IP addresses over and the NUC stepped into the HA role with barely a flicker

C

[sammy2]

So how do I run a virtual machine? Gotta back up a bit for me!

[Pabla]

@sammy2 there's ton of videos online on how to get up and running with HA but here's their guide on how to run HA OS on a virtual machine on windows

[CatmanV2]

@sammy2 Feel free to message me direct and we can go to some kind of more interactive communications. I used Virtualbox (although I was on Mac) with the defaults and it took me about 10 minutes

C

[sammy2]

Thanks to everyone for your input! It'll be a couple of days before I can get deep into this because I have very limited time these days to dabble.

[mackwabir]

This post is deleted!

[tamorgen]

Late posting, just saw this thread.

Welcome to abused Vera users club. I switched almost 2 years ago now and never looked back. When Vera Plus came out, it had such protentional and a loyal user base with great developers. I was running Vera Plus for I think 8 or 9 years, and had been experiencing deteriorating support from both Vera/Ezlo itself, as well as broken plugins that I constantly had to try to work around. When I switched, I had been monitoring the evolution of Ezlo, but it never seemed ready for prime time for me.

If you used Reactor on Vera, MSR is your answer. You can migrate your existing rules from Reactor on Vera to MSR easily.

Others have mentioned you can use Vera as a Z-wave radio. This is true, however, it's only capable of so much. If you want to use newer devices, Vera just can't take full advantage. I'm running my Home Assistant setup on a Rpi 4 with a Aeotec Zwave stick, and 80 Z-wave devices on the network, with hardly an issue. 75% of the devices are 700 series or newer with support for S2 encryption (won't get that on Vera Plus). I run MSR on my Fedora NAS server, and they work well together.

I'm constantly amazed at the possible integrations that I couldn't even dream about on Vera Plus.