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So, I think I'm in a bit of an unusual situation. I work at a camp & retreat center that has wifi throughout. I want to put a few switches in the office that can control outdoor lighting throughout the camp. We currently have switches in each of the buildings, but it is a particularly frustrating job to get all the lights on in the evening when it is brutally cold out or we are short staffed.
Most of our staff is not very tech savvy (my boss literally has his wife print out his emails for him each day!!!) so, I'd love to avoid having to set up any sort of raspberry pi or new phone app.
Is there type of 3-way switch that can connect to the wifi, turn on a light in another building AND turn on an indicator light in the office, without having any sort of wire running between the buildings? Hopefully looking for a simple solution without breaking the bank too.
I greatly appreciate any input that you can give. Thank you!
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I have a X10 wall switch system and I want to get rid of it. What would be the easiest transition to something more modern and easy to use with either wifi/homekit capabilities? My current X10 controls 3 zones in my bedroom. All zones are dimmable.
Zone 1 is 4 canister ceiling lights. LED bulbs
Zone 2 is 1 canister ceiling lights. Halogen Bulb
Zone 3 is 1 canister ceiling lights. Halogen Bulb
I have an old plug-in remote from Radio Shack and a wall switch with 3 buttons, each controlling one zone. (images attached)
My wall switch has one two wires from the wall. One black, one white.Is there any solution easy to install without the need of an electrician? Thanks for any feedback.
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I was just going to add my support for a Update Button for the bare bones version of MSR and find the thread has been removed.
I'm wondering what was so provocative that required it's removal?
Have we become as paranoid as an owner of another forum?Anyway +1 for an Update Button.
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Good morning all,
I'm working on weaning myself off of being totally Vera dependent. I've installed MSR on my Fedora home server, and I've been migrating luup Reactor rules over little by little. My hope is to use Vera as a bare bones z-wave hub, until I replace it either with Ezlo (not so sure about), or perhaps Hubitat. I'm just tired of zero new development in Vera, empty promises of native device integration, and cloud services that go down and leave my automation hanging.In any case, I digress. I've attempted to use Gcal3 on Vera to integrate Public calendars, such as Federal Holidays, School Calendars, etc. It use to somewhat work, but more often than not, all I get from Gcal3 is "token error code: HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request". The developer no longer is active, and it's effectively not working anymore.
I'd like to use these public calendars as Entity Attributes or Constraints in MSR. For instance, if it's a Federal Holiday, I don't have to work, and I may want to sleep in, which means lights may not come on as early, window coverings in the bedrooms may open later in the day, etc. Similar idea with a school calendar. If "closed" is in the event, my daughter may want to sleep in, and not want the window coverings opened as early.
I'm aware that Ezlo has integration through NuCal to all sorts of web based services, including Google Calendar, but as I stated earlier, I'm undecided on going down that path. Is there anyway to do this on MSR through any of it's abilities, such as HTTP calls or MQTT ( not experienced in MQTT, so I don't know now it works really).
Has anybody already done this?
Thanks for any advice in advance.
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Hello all, I am finally ditching my Vera and moving to HA using a Zooz ZST10 Z wave stick. I have around 50 Z wave devices with a good mix of battery devices, locks, sensors and switches. The plan is to include all the AC powered devices first, starting from the ones closest to my Z wave stick then moving outwards. Once that is complete I will go back and include all battery powered devices in the same fashion.
My question is there any quick way to exclude all my Z wave devices from Vera, or should I just delete all devices without excluding them and factory reset each device before pairing to HA?
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Some of you may know that I took at shot at building an alternate geofencing solution for Vera. The core of it was system agnostic, using the OwnTracks application and AWS lambdas to track devices and keep a central data, then disseminate that to the Vera via a websocket-based plugin. It worked with other apps as well, including Tasker and GPSLogger, but of the dozen people that were testing it, most used OwnTracks.
A lot was learned in the process, not the least of which is that the success of any such solution is highly dependent on the phone and its settings. Phone manufacturers love to set things up for the longest battery life, of course, but that's usually very anti-geofencing behavior. In the case of at least one brand, it was unusable and the settings could not be modified. It was also cost-prohibitive to maintain on Amazon, as AWS grabs a dime here and a dollar there and before you know it, it added $100/month to my AWS bill, which my wife deducted from my Scotch budget. Unacceptable.
But it's quite reasonable to use OwnTracks to a local endpoint, and I could pretty easily replicate the functionality as a local application, or maybe even as an additional endpoint built into MSR's API (still separate port and process, but in the package).
So the question really is... would you do it, or would you be too concerned about the security risks associated (e.g., dynamic DNS and NAT mapping in the firewall necessary for the phone to contact the service when not on LAN)?
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The Debian Linux machine that MSR is running on, has developed an issue and I can no longer login to it via SSH or directly on its terminal.
It was fine earlier this morning I connected to it via WinSCP to copy all the MSR files down for a backup to my laptop.
Then a bit later I could no longer connect to it. Either in WinSCP or Putty SSH, it now says access denied, even though my password is correct.
I then connected a monitor and keyboard up to the Debian box and I cannot login to it directly either, I put in the username and hit enter and I am not given a password prompt to enter it and something I could not read flashes up on the screen very fast and then disappears. I had to record a video and skip through it to capture what is says, see screen capture below.
I tried logging in as user root and my own username same thing happens, it does not even give me a prompt to enter a password.
If I boot the box in to Debian recovery mode instead I am able to login as the root user OK.
Any ideas how to fix this?
Thanks
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Sigma have released a new Z-Wave Product that may be or interest to some here.
ThunderBoard Z-wave development board.More details are here....ThunderBoard
Also Dr Z-Waves blog link text
Makes for interesting reading.
It's attractively priced at $64.95 and might be a Z-UNO alternative? -
Two stores apparently have inventory of RPI 4Bs with 2GB RAM. Get them while they last!
Raspberry Pi 4 model B - 2GB - RaspberryStore interadmin12 / 62.95 EUR Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB RAM Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB RAMBestel de nieuwe Raspberry Pi 4 B 2GB nu snel en voordelig bij Elektronicavoorjou.nl! - Raspberry Pi Boards, Behuizingen, Heatsinks, Accessoires & meer!
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Is the Smarthome company still existent? If so, are SwitchLinc switched still available?
I'm bored :D
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What are the projects you're working on?
Summer is over, and that (unfortunately) means more time indoor and (luckily) more time to build things.
I have almost nothing in my backlog and it's boring
I appreciate a couple of (crazy) ideas.
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For me I just removed the vera which I used as pure ser2net device for zigbee and replaced it with a conbee 2 stick. The idea is first to consolidate my 2 zigbee network and get rid of the philips hue 2 hub which would enable me to have only 1 zigbee mesh. If this is successful then I would work on bypassing home assistant for zigbee network control and bridge openLuup into deconz.
If you really want a big project, you could look at doing deep neural video processing. This is a very large topic I invested a couple of months on and enabled me to replace video movement detection with specific object detections along with facial recognition. All done locally of course. Coding is done in C or Python. I know that C is right down your alley!
A little further down the road I am thinking about replacing all my amazon echo with a local version likely based on Rhasppy when that project gets a little bit more mature and I find the time and courage to make the jump.
Other than that, everything just works... I have had no need to touch or tinker with anything...
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My once four, then three, and recently only two-Vera home system is now down to one, with Vera hosting my beloved four-button MiniMote hand Controllers, a few lights, and a couple of meter readers. About to clone this to a UZB and see how that goes. Shelly now doing some switches, lights, and timed thermostats.
I really need a replacement (WiFi) for the MiniMotes, but don’t see anything suitable. May have to make my own (3D printer anyone?)
Other than that, the Prolog-based plugin for openLuup HA logic is coming along very slowly.
Not doing anything right now, though, since we have a power outage (internet runs on UPS.)
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I invested in a 3D Printer...eventually.
Turns out there not that expensive after all. +1 to a Ender V2. Easy to put together and great youtube support.
The hardest part has been learning CAD- Autodesk, probably should say the most frustrating part, but now fairly conversant and can design complex designs.
That was my winter, now we are looking at Spring & Summer and the end of lockdown.
The EnderV2 is turning out adapters and wall brackets, quality is better than good and is merchantable. -
The problem may be that we are all caught in liminal time due to COVID.
I had thought I would get the Sonos system to issues voice commands to Alexa but I'm not sure what the point would be, except for some idle amusement.
Something else I would like to know; how to calculate the R value (insulation effectiveness) of our house (metric units only please). It seems to me that when you get a step change in the outside weather, which can be a significant step change where I live. Then the inside temperature decays exponentially to meet the new outside temperature. Depending on the R value of the house the decay will be rapid (poor insulation) or slow (good insulation). Any idea how to calculate the R value, given the outside temp step change delta and the inside temperature change that results after x time? A few points: assumes the outside weather changes abruptly. No heat sources inside the house or though windows. Convection of heat may affect results.
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Lately, I've
- built an integration with SmartBot push buttons (with retry, ack and battery and status report back to luup)
- bought a Kuando BusyLight and integrated into my routine (so, when I'm on a call, it automatically turns to red)
- built an app with integrated notifications on my home PC (dark, entryways, etc) via MQTT.
- built a couple of new wifi-based sensors (light, temp, humidity and distance)
- finished my tablet dashboard
- built a system to track electrical consumption, in preparation for solar
- built a new system to rotate my exterior color lights (milight+hue)
@rafale I'll probably do some image recognition for the cams (I did for a customer, but it was in cloud) and a couple of more sensors.
@akbooer finding a wifi remote is not easy. because wifi isn't really suited for battery operated devices.
@a-lurker summer here in South Italy wasn't bad as I was expecting. we managed to do very good, even if cases are rising again lately. I never got so much spare time for sure, since I used to travel a lot for work (and pleasure) and I'm at home, beach excluded, since my last vacation in Miami+Bahamas in February. I have voice enabled announcements via Alexa and my wife loves them. I have a good insulated house (very new), but I'm not sure it'd be easy to do.
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Vera+MQTT+HomeAssistant+my own framework all orchestrated via MSR
70+ Zwave Devices, a bunch of ZigBee light strips and a lot of codeMy Luup Plug-ins => https://github.com/dbochicchio/vera
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@therealdb said in I'm bored
:because wifi isn't really suited for battery operated devices.
Indeed so. Curiously, this was the promise of ZWave - that is was low power. Ironic, then, then many of the major failings of Zwave (certainly in the Vera world) were based around battery devices (polling, or not, etc.)
There are low power WiFi devices and (single) buttons, but truly hard to find anything more capable. Maybe that's the one things that will keep my Zwave system going (albeit on ZWay, not on Vera.)
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I would not confuse the vera failures with zwave failures. Battery operated devices operate brilliantly with zwave. Vera's problem was around the background "maintenance" they thought was going to make user configuration easier. It just made it a complete nightmare.
There are now cheap low powered wifi devices but... I would still prefer not to mix up low bandwidth network for home automation with the high bandwidth of wifi as it will (at least until full wifi6 implementation is effective) eat up wifi bandwidth. It is more of a scalability issue than anything else. Once you start having a lot of devices, the wifi band airtime will start getting congested which is why for these types of appliances, I try to avoid wifi. The amount of wifi channels is also very limited as the trend is to broaden channels to allow more per device bandwidth and to also to use more and more channels to support more devices simultaneously...
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This winter I will work on my project to get small ESP sensor connected to a RPi to warn me if the plans needs some water, in planning for several years. I will also as @therealdb work with the tablet dashboards- And integrate some electronics into my Millenium-Falcon, Tie-fighter models. (Yes, I'm still married)
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Finally fixed Mrs C's iPhone locator. Adding some more logic now we're actually going out of the house (for a while)
What I'm toying with now is some ideas for
a) Smart shower (assuming I get another job that means I need to get up and get in the shower)
b) IR control for scene setting per my old Philips Pronto and (to a lesser extent) my Harmony. The Harmony hub is the obvs choice, and given my Harmony One is on its last legs this may be first.C
