Vera PushOver notification with image

[therealdb]

@toggledbits I 100% agree. My system is stable, and I've since removed 90% of my scenes to further improve it. I'm in the middle of choosing to completely migrate to Home Assistant (and start from scratch with the logic, a tough exercise, but probably a better investment), to MSR (but I want to write code :D), or to my own home-grown solution (which already runs 20% of my logic, TTS, weather, MQTT and many more things). We'll see.

I will not update my plug-ins and I will remove them from the app store anyway. It's sad, but I think eZlo will not build a viable solution for us enthusiasts and probably just focus on very simplicists users. Otherwise, I'm not explaining why, after 2+ years of development, the features offered by their hubs are very, very, very basic.

[wmarcolin]

@toggledbits and @therealdb

As I already commented in the other forum, it is clear that there is no more effort to fix FW problems, we are relegated to survive with what we have, and that is that.

For more than a year I have been frequenting these user forums, and I have tried to do everything that I understood to be good to reduce the tasks of the Vera hub, I no longer use, for example, Reactor and migrated everything to MSR, an excellent measure. I don't have any scene anymore, everything is in MSR.

Another very important topic that helped me a lot in the system performance, was @rafale77 explanation (https://community.ezlo.com/t/zwave-network-on-vera-explained/210661/3), I executed everything he recommended, increased the battery life, and helped in the performance.

However, despite having done all this, I still have a system that I find unstable. Without the slightest explanation, I get device failure messages that are waiting for a wakeup, and then I have to manually press buttons to get it working again. The device with S2 protection, a huge headache to include and work. Reading some posts above, when I change from Home to Night mode, it is crazy, everything gets an indication that is waiting to run, and of course, the system almost dies.

Before I take what I believe is the most radical step, buying a Hubitat Elevation to solve problems with S2, to have true support for ZigBee devices, I want to make three consultations with you who are super experts:

1. The procedure of decoupling the Vera from the mother ship (https://github.com/toggledbits/Vera-Decouple), I have read and re-read the instruction, besides the comments above, seems to me a great measure. The only thing that is not clear to me is, will the Vera APP on the phone, which allows us to control devices remotely, still work? Will I be able to continue turning things on and off through the APP, or will it stop working?

2. It seems clear to me that the mode shift made by the Vera hub is a problem. I can easily create actions in MSR to perform the actions, although I find it not very productive. Does setting the My Preset Modes panel to DEFAULT mean that the Vera hub won't do anything else when the mode is activated? It will not take any further action? Now when commanding everything from the MSR, I would have to put a time delay between commands, so as not to overload the hub, is that it? In summary, is it recommended to change everything to MSR or is there something to be done first?

3. Any thread that I'm missing recommendations for settings, cleaning, or changing the hub that might be helping too? Something to clean up space? Disable useless function?

The change from Vera to Hubitat is inevitable, however, what will I do to add new devices. Touching the installed base will mean having to reinstall more than 100 devices, search for a manual on the internet to do a factory reset, review a lot of MSR actions to go from one hub to another.

I'm using the latest version 1.7.5386 (7.32) for Vera, the the last MSR 21297.

Thanks.

[CatmanV2]

@therealdb said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

Otherwise, I'm not explaining why, after 2+ years of development, the features offered by their hubs are very, very, very basic.

My feeling is they already missed the boat. I would give them a life expectancy of <2 years, depending on how much Melih is prepared to bankroll it.

They have failed to deliver an improved Vera and (as far as I can tell) are failing to produce anything in the way of a usable Ezlo.

C

[Pabla]

Ezlo should've stuck with the old Vera FW and worked to give it more features and fix it since its already been used for years. They shot themselves in the foot by taking too long to get a proper working hub out, the home control market has already matured with some really heavy hitters from HA to Hubitat.

I was very close to switching to HA but that requires running a Rpi of sorts to run MSR which will need a pretty big overhaul of logic since it will need to work with all the new devices in HA and I will need to rebuild my Home Remote application. My VP on 7.32 runs pretty stable until a device randomly goes offline then sh*t hits the fan, I run minimal plugins to keep things stable. Had the Z wave network on Vera been better I would've stayed since I basically only have Z wave related issues.

[akbooer]

@wmarcolin said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

it is clear that there is no more effort to fix FW problems, we are relegated to survive with what we have, and that is that.

Ah! … so that would essentially be end of life, then?

[rafale77]

I have been mostly silent on this forum for some time now with the exception of the occasional notifications for questions addressed to me because I just moved to a new house and my system had been rock solid for over a year... mostly since I got rid of the vera.

I now have to re-build everything from scratch in my new house while I had literally zero reliability issues with my previous setup in spite of its complexity (200+ devices integrated running 3 different software platform interconnected between z-way for zwave, Homeassistant for AI/cameras and the rare cloud integrations or integrations not existing on openLuup/vera and openLuup for scenes/automation/control interface.)
I considered long and hard to sell my old home with the automation but at the end I decided to move as much as I could over mostly because I noticed an increasing trend of the industry to go towards wifi for ease of setup but which cannot scale to large installations and have to encroach into wifi bandwidth. It is getting a bit harder to buy zwave and even zigbee devices. I also didn't want to spend the time to go through the learning curve of hubitat which would have yielded no benefit to my setup.
Dumping the vera was the single biggest improvement to my system and please, no ezlo... They are cost reduced and downgraded controllers to the vera in every important practical aspect.

My new setup will be much lighter. Probably will not get to 175 zwave nodes, more likely <100 without the window coverings, fewer lights, fewer sensors. Heck I think I will dump the Phillips hue altogether too. I can't recommend enough migrating away from vera and go to openLuup or MSR in combination with Home Assistant for zigbee and integrations and z-way for z-wave while keeping devices as local as possible by avoiding all the wifi stuff which tend to be cloud dependent (with all their reliability and security disadvantages) and less efficient both in power and RF bandwidth. Still a new adventure...

[toggledbits]

@wmarcolin said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

...decouple... will the Vera APP on the phone, which allows us to control devices remotely, still work?

No. The Vera cloud regards the hub as offline, so you won't be able to connect to it from the app.

@wmarcolin said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

Does setting the My Preset Modes panel to DEFAULT mean that the Vera hub won't do anything else when the mode is activated?

Also no. The hub goes through all the devices looking at ModeSettings and sets the arming or other states according to its configuration. There are problems here, as you've noted. Setting to default means all security sensors will switch between armed and disarmed as appropriate to the mode (which it does by just setting the state variable, not by calling the SetArmed action -- a violation of their own UPnP rules). So the default actually causes a lot of activity.

@wmarcolin said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

Now when commanding everything from the MSR, I would have to put a time delay between commands, so as not to overload the hub, is that it?

MSR already has pacing for actions on the Vera hub. The default is minimum 25ms delay between commands. It's configurable. But, since there's been little issue that I've heard about this, it seems the default delay is adequate. I still have the bulk of my ZWave network on the Vera, and my morning and night tasks modify dozens of devices all at once, no problem.

[toggledbits]

@pabla said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

I was very close to switching to HA but that requires running a Rpi of sorts to run MSR

Just for clarity, you can run MSR on whatever hardware HA is running on.

[wmarcolin]

@toggledbits thanks as always for your clarifications.

But still, on the topic of disconnecting from the mother ship, I understand that it helps a lot, correct? Even if you lose external control.

Now, I understand that several people have made the disconnection, what have they done then to have external control of the house? The simple task of turning on and off a light remotely, how would it be done?

Thanks.

[toggledbits]

Disconnecting does seem to help stabilize the box. There seem to be quite a few conditions under which Luup will decide to reload in response to various network/cloud events. At one point, even the act of logging in using their remote access caused a reload, but I believe that was fixed. The major wins, though, I think come from relying on more resources within your own network, which makes the system more robust when there's an internet outage. The screen grab I posted above is my decoupled Edge system, as of this writing up without a reload for almost 72 days (about two hours to go).

I think a lot of people prefer VPN access to relying on Vera's cloud. It's what I do as well.

[Crille]

@wmarcolin I haven’t decoupled my Vera but use Homebridge for all local and remote control.

[wmarcolin]

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[wmarcolin]

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[CatmanV2]

catman@openluup:~$ uptime
06:24:00 up 173 days, 23:30, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.08, 0.08

Although to be fair Openluup was actively restarted 7 days back

C

[CatmanV2]

I see that Vesternet are giving 50% off Vera Secure...
....and they've just launched their own range of devices:

Z-Wave

Z-Wave is an advanced wireless home automation technology that enables you to create a smart home environment where your electrical products, lighting, heating and blinds can work together as a single system. As Z-Wave is a modular system you can start as small as you wish and then expand your home...

C

[Alan_F]

I just found this thread after making my way over to this site to get started with MSR (running on Raspberry Pi 4 Docker) for my VeraPlus. I've been following the 7.32 discussion on the Ezlo site and it definitely sounds like 7.32 isn't coming out of beta anytime soon. I purchased two leak/flood sensors that are supported in 7.32 but not in 7.31, so I'm motivated to get onto 7.32 to get those monitored before I have (another) leak.

Is the beta reasonably stable and free of glaring bugs? If so, can anyone save me some internet searching and point me to a valid download link? Edit: I figured out the download links from the Ezlo Community site: Do I want the Open Beta 4 downloads or one of the older ones?

I realize that nothing is completely stable on Vera, so I'm just looking to see if there are any major issues with 7.32 that I need to consider before trying the beta.

I use Google Home for voice command of the Vera and use the Vera app for geofencing to trigger home/away actions, so the cloud connection is doing some useful things for me at this point. Do I need to decouple to make 7.32 stable? Or are there people using it successfully without going through the decoupling process?

Thanks for any help.

[CatmanV2]

You probably want to start a new thread, but FWIWI I'd make the jump to $somethingelse

C

[toggledbits]

@alan_f said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

Do I want the Open Beta 4 downloads or one of the older ones?

You want beta 4. It's also linked in this thread in an earlier post by @tunnus

@alan_f said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

I use Google Home for voice command of the Vera and use the Vera app for geofencing to trigger home/away actions, so the cloud connection is doing some useful things for me at this point. Do I need to decouple to make 7.32 stable?

You don't need to decouple, and if you're using the native geofencing, you cannot decouple, as decoupling would break that. Even without decoupling, 7.32 is more stable for most users; I suspect those for which it is not are also users of older and less well-maintained/written plugins. Without decoupling, you'll have instability during Internet outages, although there are things you can do without a full decouple to improve on that as well.

@catmanv2 said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

FWIWI I'd make the jump to $somethingelse

I think @CatmanV2 's point here is that Vera is walking dead, so by sticking with it, you are only putting off the inevitable. If you start picking up HA or Hubitat now, MSR will let you make the transition more gradually using your old Vera cooperatively with the new hub(s). When your Vera dies, you may not find a replacement, but at least, you'll either have shelved it already, or be so far along the curve with a newer solution that taking the last steps will be less harrowing.

[gwp1]

@tunnus Is this not for the VeraSecure? It gave me a "wrong platform" error.

[CatmanV2]

@toggledbits said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

@catmanv2 said in Vera firmware 7.32 beta:

FWIWI I'd make the jump to $somethingelse

I think @CatmanV2 's point here is that Vera is walking dead, so by sticking with it, you are only putting off the inevitable. If you start picking up HA or Hubitat now, MSR will let you make the transition more gradually using your old Vera cooperatively with the new hub(s). When your Vera dies, you may not find a replacement, but at least, you'll either have shelved it already, or be so far along the curve with a newer solution that taking the last steps will be less harrowing.

Exactly that.

C