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I have a need to just push a button, since I can't hack the thing at the moment. I know there's MicroBot, but they're bluetooth, requires and hub and are not local. I'm OK with BT or an additional hub, but I really really want local control. Anyone? Thanks!
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So, I'm at the 4th Z-wave devices and I still have trouble in getting my Vera operate my door gate, and getting the input from the doorbell. It's already all 220v, because I have an external modulo meant for integration. So, last night I had an idea: why not use a Shelly 1 as both sensor and opener? If you need instructions on wiring, here's an image: Shelly 1 can operate the output independently from the input. So, I prototyped this: I attached to the doorbell sensor O attached to the gate opener It seems to work on my bench, because I can call the endpoints when the button is pressed or the input is triggered, so I can update virtual devices and execute all the logic I want. I usually integrate these devices with MQTT, but it's not necessary in this case, since I can live with a doorbell buzz being missed. Bonus point: you can run it at 12v if you want. Next in my TODO list, the Shelly Universal, a 9 EUR universal binary inputs, with separated inputs and outputs (so, you can get 2 inputs and operate 2 outputs independently), that I'll probably use in my weather sensors project, where I'm using two Shelly 1 at the moment, just the get the inputs.
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Shelly i3 is an unbelievably cheap (9,99 EUR/USD) WiFi device that’s part of the fantastic Shelly family. It supports REST API, MQTT and much more. mundzhos Shelly i3 | Shelly Cloud 10 It’s just L,N and 3 inputs. No relays, so it’s a scene controller with bonus point to the fact that you can use your own buttons and keep the aesthetics of your house. Bonus points for WAF. It’s very small, so it will fit in your standard wall box easily. While I built my own Scene Controller Virtual Device and I’m using MQTT for other devices of the family, Shelly can call your HTTP endpoints on button presses and in this case is more than enough. The buttons support different actions (press, long press, double/triple press) and you can just call a service endpoint, or update a variable: Go get it if you need a very cheap, very reliable scene controller for your home.
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I'm going to throw this in here, but I don't actually expect a solution, but it might help someone else. I have three of these magnetic sensors and the work. Kind of. The issue is that if you open and close the door within about 2 seconds, they trip correctly and then will not untrip unless the door is opened and closed (for more than about 2 seconds) . This makes them virtually useless for any security application unless you are very slow through the doors. Even forcing setting 'Tripped' to zero using lua fails. Well it doesn't fail but it's simply reversed: 2020-07-03 15:01:24.783 luup_log:0: ALTUI: runLua(luup.variable_set("urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:SecuritySensor1", "Tripped", "0", 20780) 2020-07-03 15:01:24.783 luup.variable_set:: 20780.urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:SecuritySensor1.Tripped was: 1 now: 0 #hooks:0 2020-07-03 15:01:25.044 luup.variable_set:: 20780.urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:SecuritySensor1.Tripped was: 0 now: 1 #hooks:0 So there it is. Unless anyone has any smart ideas (apart from not opening and closing the doors quickly, I'd avoid buying these. (PS the only apparent setting that might affect this is the the delay before sending 'untripped' but even setting that to 10 seconds makes no difference. In short, it seems that thee devices have a hardware limitation in how soon they can be tripped. C
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Hey guys... Is it just me or the GE/Jasco switch or very sensible to power outage ? Almost each time we have a power outage, I need to replace at least 1 switch to replace. Each time, same behaviour, the blue led is flashing rapidely and nothing works. Last power outage, I got 3 switches. 95% of our switch and dimmer are GE/Jasco.
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I've just completed my setup (after exactly 3 years from moving in, priorities!) and even if I wrote all the code in C#, I could port it easily to LUA (I guess ) I've used Fully Kiosk Browser + 3D Printed Mount (check https://makesbymike.com/) and a custom HTML dashboard, all running on an Amazon Fire Tablet: WAF is very high Sorry for the Italian interface. First row is temperature/humidity sensors (esterno = outside, piscina = pool, salotto = open space, zona giorno = 1st floor, zona notte = 2nd floor, lavanderia = laundry room). Then I have a bunch of commands/scenes sent to Vera to change blinds/roller shutters (they are automatically managed, but wife pretends to be smarter than code, from time to time ). Last row has notifications for washer/dryer, with the cycle end date. When doing its cycle, the background becomes orange, then green when completed. It's probably the best feature, since the laundry room is in the basement. There's also a link to cams (videosorveglianza) and I automatically open TinyCamPro in case of movement outside/doors/gates are opened. Is there any interest in a generic wall mount tablet plug-in, offering simple dashboard (maybe json-driven) and integration with Fully Kiosk API? I'm currently dimming screen on/off, get the battery status and schedule a 20-80 cycle for the battery, via a smart plug and a bunch of lua code. I planned for this when I did the electrical setup, so the tablet has a standard european 503 (recessed) box with ethernet, that I attached to the 5V into the network closet to feed the tablet. I'm updating the screen via AJAX every 30 secs. Here's a behind the scenes photo as well
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Starting a thread about "How do you use your MIMO2" ... Maybe that will give other users some ideas...
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I'm in the middle of adding a water tank, because the latest summers were very hot and we had our water restricted, sometimes for weeks and for extended hours during the day (from 7 am to 5 pm). It should be automatic, thanks to pressure sensors, so it will integrate water when needed (and the main line is open), switch the pump, etc. But I want to add a water level sensor nonetheless, to monitor it if necessary. I will probably just double this project and automate the pool refill as well, since I'm doing it manually at the moment. I took a look and a lot of people are using Zunos, but I'm not sure I want to spend so much on a so simple system. Pre-built solutions are OK. Thanks!
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I'm in the process of trying to get some info from my pool controller using Modbus. If I'll ever succeed, I want to write a generic plug-in for Vera/openluup, to be added to my collection of virtual device plug-in. I'll write a custom app in a Raspberry offering access to the controller via HTTP. Long story short, I think I'm almost covered. Typical device: heater pumps (on/off) jets (on/off) lights (dimmers, on/off) filtration (on/off) temperature sensor generic sensor (for ph/redox probes) I think I'm almost covered by standard devices, but I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing. I'll probably use a multistring to display status, since it's already supported in mobile apps, but I'm wondering if there's some kind of more granular way to show something and avoid custom devices and similar.
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Anyone having a water pressure sensor either zigbee or Z-wave? I need to record and graph the water pressure coming in the house from the city...
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I had this setup and working perfectly in my vera for years. I recently accidentally deleted the device. I tried to re-add it as generic zwave. No problem, all devices come up fine and work. But the vera keeps trying to get secure classes. This is an old device I don’t think it’s zwave plus and it worked on my vera vefore. Vera can’t configure the parameters on the device and vera thinks its a failed device. But it works. Any experts know this one? |-<:)
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does anyone know of an outdoor PIR without zwave plus? TIA |-<:)
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With a ChemE and Electrochemist background and wanted to share some understanding on batteries. I looked around and was surprised to find as little as I did on battery comparisons. I only found this site: Disposable Batteries compared -- Alkaline, Lithium, Carbon Zinc, Oxyride The summary is this: Alkaline are cheap. Lithium are expensive but last much longer for high drain applications like powering a motor. They also are much more tolerant to low temperatures so they are more suitable for outdoor use. They have much higher capacity but this difference becomes pretty insignificant when used under low drain condition. (example are z-wave and zigbee sensors) and are therefore both a cost and environmental waste for these applications. The rechargeable battery technology has progressed a lot in the past 10-15 years. Their biggest drawbacks were low capacity, high self discharge rate and limited number of recharge cycles. All have significantly improved with the LSD (Low Self Discharge) NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) batteries. The famous Sanyo/Panasonic eneloop are an example of these. The use of different batteries will have a significant impact on the battery readback reports from our devices because most of devices estimate the battery capacity percentage based on their voltage assuming they are alkaline: While the alkaline behaves almost linearly draining from 1.55V to 1.1V, lithium present a near step function characteristic starting at ~1.75V (AA -LR6 and AAA-LR3) and stay at that voltage until suddenly dropping to 1.5V at which point they are almost incapable of delivering high currents. They will then deliver gradually lower currents until ~1.4V where they can be considered empty. NiMH on the other hand start at ~1.35V and drop near linearly to 1.1V The result is that lithium batteries will always show as full until suddenly stopping to work, showing 0% or nothing at all. NiMH will start at 0-25% when full. These all can render the battery read-back very misleading... But either alternative choices according their applications will be much more cost effective and environmentally savvy. Adding info on other common rechargeable batteries for those interested but less relevant for Smarthomes: NiCd: Still found in many devices, they have much smaller energy density (lower capacity) and support fewer recharge cycles than NiMH. They offer the advantage of having a very short load transient, meaning they are able to deliver full current immediately after the load is put on them, making them very good for powering motors. They are mostly used in power tools Li-Ion: Very high energy density. It is what is used in laptops, phones and... some planes. More expensive and not available in low voltage/small format.
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Any expert out there to verify? I have 1 zwave device added for test and it shows in hass as an entity and I can control it. Are all setting ok? Ideal? How can I change in zwave2mqtt the name of the device and auto "let it change" in hass? Or is that not the way it was meant to be?
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Sharing links I often use to explain z-wave: Understanding Z-Wave Networks, Nodes & Devices Z-Wave technology enables you to create a reliable home automation network with numerous nodes and devices communicating with each other simultaneously. Your Guide to a User Friendly & Stable Z-Wave Network This guide looks deeper into Z-Wave controllers and networks, enabling you to achieve a user friendly and stable Z-Wave network in your home.
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I am seeing a lot reports and complains throughout various home automation forums about people complaining about failed flash: SD cards (notoriously rPis and all SBCs for every known platforms) USB drives (vera USB logging) and internal on board flash for vera. All of these cause system failures and data corruption. While the vera is a case of needless auto-flagellation with their very highly rated SLC NAND flash paired with a mind boggling drive partitioning causing them to barely use 10% of the storage space the hardware makes available, the others are due to using inappropriate hardware for their purpose. What is important to know is that a flash memory cell has a limited lifetime. The smaller the cell is, the thinner the gate holding the charge is and the more fragile/less enduring it is. This is why the industry has gone vertical with V-NAND or 3D NAND instead of just shrinking the size of the cells to reduce cost and increase density. Following this move to the third dimension, came the idea that each charge could contain more than one bit by holding different state values. That's what MLC (Multi Level Cell, in practice only 2) and TLC (Tri Level Cell) and now QLC (Quad Level Cell). MLC means that the cell now has 4 states (2^2), TLC has 8 (2^3), QLC has 16 (2^4) states or distinct cell voltage levels. The compromise to these multi-level of the cells is increased error rate and lower reliability (accuracy of the charge depends in part on how worn the gate is) which needs to be compensated by ECC in their controllers. It is indeed harder to get the voltage right than a digital have voltage or have not logic. The difference in endurance can be a couple of orders of magnitude! The cheaper NAND flash like what you find in eMMC, SD cards and most USB flash drives are slow and have less write endurance because of they use the cheaper QLC/TLC technologies. (1GB QLC costs the same to make as 256MB of SLC and possibly significantly less because of smaller cell size) Another layer of reliability improvements in SSDs has been TRIM, garbage collection, and wear leveling. All three features are meant to distribute the writing more evenly across the cells, run background reset of the cells so as to speed up the write process... Well none of these exist on a controller-less NAND like an SD card or eMMC and this is why you could have a large flash drive corrupt data because it's been overwriting the exact same cells over and over while the rest of the cells may never have been used. For a home automation platform which needs to constantly save variable states and logs in various files, an SSD is definitely a better way to go than those controller-less storages... This is even more true for embedded/non replaceable storage...
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Many of us have done this before but this is meant for the newbies. This solves the problem some people may have to get their home automation radios centered in their mesh in the house while their server would be somewhere else. It is inspired by what Homeseer has done with their Z-NET product which is a raspberry pi with a zwave HAT which uses ser2net to send its zwave serial port over IP to the host controller but it is really more generically useable across any type of platform controller or even radio. Regardless of it being zwave or zigbee or even bluetooth if this ever takes off, they all are serial ports on the operating system. Since they all use a distribution of linux, one can install ser2net on it. I posted the nuke-vera script which adds the disabling of everything vera on a vera plus. This example from the openhab forum is for a rPi Oct 7, 2017 Share Z-wave dongle over IP (USB over IP using ser2net / socat ) guide Hi, Recently i’ve been working on virtualising all IT systems in my home. I’ve virtualised my NAS, Firewall, Router, Network Video Recorder and ofcourse my Openhab2 setup. During this virtualisation effort i ran into a few issues with regards to passing through my Z-wave.me USB1 z-wave dongle to... This is a more generic example Connecting to a Remote Serial Port over TCP/IP It is a well known trick but very useful.
Water level sensor
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I'm in the middle of adding a water tank, because the latest summers were very hot and we had our water restricted, sometimes for weeks and for extended hours during the day (from 7 am to 5 pm).
It should be automatic, thanks to pressure sensors, so it will integrate water when needed (and the main line is open), switch the pump, etc. But I want to add a water level sensor nonetheless, to monitor it if necessary. I will probably just double this project and automate the pool refill as well, since I'm doing it manually at the moment.
I took a look and a lot of people are using Zunos, but I'm not sure I want to spend so much on a so simple system.
Pre-built solutions are OK. Thanks!
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Does it need to be analog or digital would suffice?
I remember years ago using an analog ultrasonic sensor for sensing liquid level from the top without having to immerse it. It would then be about sending that signal to zwave or any other wireless protocol. It was relatively cheap to do.If a digital level would suffice then 2 immersed water sensors would do? One for full and one for empty? Then I have a couple of such zwave water sensors. Since it is water and non corrosive it would probably be ok?
Ecolink has one:
Aeotec too:
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yep. my first idea was to place 2/3 sensors, but I'll probably explore the ultrasonic way. I'm open to wifi (there's good coverage) and I still have a spare Fibaro smart implant (even if I had to remove one from my weather station, because it was unreliable and I had to frequently restart it - probably for heat).
I'll explore the ESP*+ultrasonic sensor route, even if I'm not very proficient with electronics. Thanks for the suggestion!
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One option would be to use MySensors. This is a cheap way of adding various Arduino sensors to OpenLuup. You set up an Ethernet gateway and then each sensor is connected to the gateway wirelessly. There is a MySensors plugin that works in OpenLuup.
This looks like an interesting project, that you perhaps can get inspiration from: Round water tank level sensor
Good luck!
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A pressure sensor in the bottom would be a good solution.
What is used in car fuel tanks?
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@akbooer said in Water level sensor:
What is used in car fuel tanks?
Usually it's a float with a rod, actuating a potentiometer. (variable resistor)
Not sure about the pressure sensor as it depends on the shape of the tank (how deep the tank is) and it will be exposed to atmospheric pressure variations. The advantage of the ultrasonic one is that it is non contact and won't grow stuff in the water.
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@rafale77 said in Water level sensor:
@akbooer said in Water level sensor:
What is used in car fuel tanks?
Usually it's a float with a rod, actuating a potentiometer. (variable resistor)
This
C
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Two (high and low)of these(bare wire):
Auto Top Off
Finally, a top-off control sensor that is mounted to your sump with a magnet rather than a clunky bracket! Driven by a pressure-sensitive switch located in the relay box, a strong magnetic field won't affect its operation. The sensor tube can't get clogged with calcium deposits or activated by...
And two of these:
Ecolink Intelligent Technology Z-Wave Easy Install, Battery Operated, Door/Window Sensor, White & Brown (DWZWAVE2-ECO) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HPIYJWU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_3Je6Eb7ECMY2VAnd bob’s your uncle
|-<:)
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I like to keep thing simple so i would go with a float switch.
One other thing in the UK we do not store drinking water, the only water storage in the uk is for filling baths and toilets. Do you intend to attach this tank to your drinking water pipes/tapes?
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@ArcherS thanks for the input. I have various WiFi devices around the house, so I’ll probably add another one. I’ll go with MQTT, since I have a bridge to Vera I use to bridge other devices (tasmota, Sonoff, my own).
Thanks anyone for the suggestion. Now to find some pre built device template to borrow.
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@Elcid yep, it’s allowed to drink, via chemicals to be added every now and then. I successfully intercepted the alert the public water company is dispatching, so maybe I can empty/fill on demand.
I was exploring a UV based solution too, but I want to start easy. I will probably add this and automate everything in the future.
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Ok just thought i would bring up the health risks, advice i read is its best to limit the tank size for drinking so the water does not sit for long and is replaced regularly. You sound like you know what you are doing. good luck
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that's correct. the water needs to be refreshed often and never stay in the tank (if you're not correcting it with chemicals - that's a small capsule intended for drinking water consumption).
since it's hot here during the summer and the water pipes are public, there's a lot of leaks and the water is never enough (to be honest, I'm living in a zone with lots of water, but we're exporting to neighbor regions as well). so, this kind of implant is very common, from houses to restaurants, etc.
these thanks are UV resistant, can handle -40/+60° C and is algae/mold proof. they're specifically intended for drinking water.
my house implants were already done when I bought it, so I had to use the current configuration, but it's becoming common to separate toilets pipe/garden pipes and use rain or a pump to get non-drink water. I guess you can make it more complex if you want, as with everything
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Best to shade tank from sun and keep it as cool as possible to, even if the tank is uv proof, the cooler the water the better.
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@Elcid it’s inside the house. I think it’s mandatory for drink water.
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Float valves fail. Regularly. Pressure switch has no moving parts and has been significantly more reliable for me.
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So, after consulting with a friend into NodeMCU, I'm going for
- NodeMCU esp8266 (flashed with Tasmota, so MQTT)
- JSN-SR04T Waterproof Ultranosic Distance sensor
I will probably write a MQTT to openluup bridge, if time allows. I'm getting a couple from Amazon, and tons from AliExpress for further projects. I will probably consolidate my weather station and place a couple of addition temperature sensors across the house.
I'll probably order other sensors, just to experiment.
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Keep us posted. I’m very interested in this.
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@prophead since I'm not that good into soldering, I always choose plug&play projects
I already have a couple of Tasmota devices: one to monitor temperature in my pool and one for humidity in my open space, to trigger a dehumidifier (large windows, helpful during the winter) and they're quite plug&play, after you've flashed Tasmota.You can poll data easily, thanks to their API (I developed my virtual devices plug-in for this) or integrate real-time change notification with MQTT, or use both. I have MQTT with a custom C# app bridging to virtual devices.
The only problem is they are Wi-Fi based, so I don't want to have too many, because I really prefer Z-Wave and its mesh topology. But they're cheap and can be integrated with every sensor on the planet, quite easily.I'll probably build a prototype next week and I'll report back.
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I am building a infinityppool to a customer and I use a Pressure-type level sensor #12086 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCe_wYQ_BC0
ASIN AQUA Home en - ASEKO
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Amazon.com : Ecolink Zwave Plus Flood & Freeze Sensor, White (FLF-ZWAVE5-ECO) : Camera & Photo
