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Hi,
I am a student and recently i am working on smart home project and writing a seminar paper about the way users handle and manage IoT devices. I you have 3 min, please fill below survey. Its really short.
Thank you in advance, I really appreciate everyone's help. -
Hello,
I have a kitchen light that can be controlled by two switches, using either to turn it off or on. I have been slowly changing things over to be a smart home but this is the first switch I am attempting to install.
I am in a double wide modular home (mobile) that was built in 1994.
At first I thought I would need a 3 way switch but when taking the normal switches apart I realized that was incorrect because the wiring on my switches are different than anything I could find online.
For one a 3 way smart switch requires 5 wires and there are only 2 wires going into the primary switch with 3 wires going into the secondary switch from the primary switch (at least I think the 3 wires connect the two switches together). Images will be attached of the wiring.
There are two wires (one black and one white) going into the first switch and 3 wires (black, white, and red) going out of that and into the second switch (I assume). The odd thing is the red wire going to the second switch is connected to the white wire going into the first switch and the white wire going into the second switch seems to be a bridge wire or a traveler wire. Not exactly sure. You will see what I mean in the images.
I need to know what kind of smart switch I can use in this set up with one remaining a normal switch.
Note that for some reason the images got switched around when uploading them. The image with 2 wires on one side and 3 on the other is what I think is the primary and the image with just 3 wires is the secondary.
Primary.jpg Secondary.jpg -
You lot are more likely to have a view than most I know. Our much used Logitech Harmony is (not so) slowly dying.
And Logitech have discontinued the entire line.
And no one else appears to be making something similar.
Was going for a Sofabaton X1, but no numeric keypad. Sofabaton U1, but no favourites.
Anyone got suggestions?
Needs to have those features, oh and not be only a phone app.....C
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Since one member asked at one point about the "front end" and "back end", I drew this showing the controller from the base to the tip along with what I have found to be the best options from my testing. Almost every controller will try to integrate all elements, especially commercial ones but... they all have strengths and weaknesses so if one can have a medley of the best ones...
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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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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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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.
Incrementing an outside awning with Reactor/MSR
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I have a Reactor set up to extend an outside awning when the OAT reaches 26C and it's after 1100, that part is straightforward enough, however I wanted to take it one step further and rather than it being either fully out or the reverse I'd like to have the ability to increment it either In or Out by a certain distance (typically 500mm) every 120 secs or so.
I had tried to do this with PLEG based on Sun position but failed miserably and never attempted to do this with distance and time.
I have looked at adding it to the current Reactor but not being fully fluent in Reactor I've hit a brick wall and don't see if it can be done - anyone point me in the right direction is is this something that Reactor can't do? -
A. There's nothing Reactor cannot do!
B. I think you'll want to open the ▼ chevron (in Reactor for Vera) or ... button (in MSR) next to one of your AND conditions.
C. Use "Pulse" to have them momentarily go TRUE (for, say 1-2 seconds) every 120 seconds.
D. The pulsing will automatically cease once either condition stops being TRUE.I hope this helps!
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@librasun said in Incrementing an outside awning with Reactor/MSR:
I hope this helps
It certainly does ( and implemented), any idea how to tie this in with my original idea of following the sun's position?
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My only idea involves using trigonometry and time to compute an angle, then scale everything to the travel extents of your awning. Hardly practical!
Probably a much easier way. Will chew on this a while.
Hints:- https://api.sunrise-sunset.org/json?lat=36.7201600&lng=-4.4203400&date=today gives free JSON responses that include solar noon
- You can compute that just as readily by knowing sunrise and sunset times, and your latitude.
- In my "SiteSensor" thread, this formula would likewise provide Solar Noon for the specified lat/lon location:
Sn:=openWx.sys.sunrise + floor((openWx.sys.sunset - openWx.sys.sunrise) / 2)
I'll expand on how you could use this to modulate the awning position tomorrow.
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You know about the Heliotrope plug-in that tracks the sun’s position...?
GitHub - a-lurker/Vera-Plugin-Heliotrope: Update of Futzle's Heliotrope plugin
Update of Futzle's Heliotrope plugin. Contribute to a-lurker/Vera-Plugin-Heliotrope development by creating an account on GitHub.
It’s in the Alt App Store.
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Incidentally, all the same calculations are done natively in openLuup in order to compute sunrise/set times.
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MSR also has native sun calcs. I guess I need to expose some of those features more, eh?
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No matter which source you use (MSR's built-in sunrise/sunset feature is probably optimal!), here's some back-of-the-napkin thoughts on how to calculate when and how to adjust your awning throughout the morning, assuming you start the process at Sunrise:
Rule Expressions:
shade_range= (<shade_max> - <shade_min>)
elapsed_time= floor((<sunset_time> - <sunrise_time>) / 2)
shade_move_per_cycle= N
cycle_interval= floor(<elapsed_time> / (<shade_range>/N))Then in your Rule's Set Action:
[INTERVAL] [EVERY] [<cycle_interval> seconds]
[ENTITY ACTION] [MOVE SHADE] [N steps]NOTE: THIS IS ALL PSEUDO-CODE. I leave the actual formulae as an exercise for the reader.
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Sun angle is now part of a new "Sun Information" entity that will be published by the System Controller.
Author of Multi-system Reactor and Reactor, DelayLight, Switchboard, and about a dozen other plugins that run on Vera and openLuup.
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Whoa, sweet! I know my out of left field suggestions might be a bit too much at times, but is there any chance that MSR will track statistics such as how often a particular rule runs during a given time span?
And how will users ultimately be notified if circular logic causes a rule to run excessively? Perhaps it is premature to be asking about that. -
@toggledbits said in Incrementing an outside awning with Reactor/MSR:
Sun angle is now part of a new "Sun Information" entity that will be published by the System Controller.
All great replies and food for thought. I played around with the heliotrope plugin with PLEG, as I mentioned previously but couldn't make it work - but reactor is a different beast.
Any chance of exposing the sun & moon functions ( I assume that Moon functions are also present) in Reactor as well as MSR? -
It doesn't have moon functions yet. Tell me how you want to use them.
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Full Moon and exterior lights - (deleted witty reply
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Sounds good. When you figure out what your logic inputs need to be to make it work the way you want, let me know and we can talk about maybe getting those implemented.
