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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?
differentiation
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Trying to research the sweet spot post-vera. After a lot of research heres what I came up with, help me understand if this is correct.
I view HA as client / server with the server being my back-end Z-wave engine (Zway, Vera, hass-openzwave) and the client being the front end UI (OpenLuup, HASS, VeraUI, AltUI)
For me the key differentiator seems to be on the client side, particularly in regard to apps. That is those things that are not zwave but need to interact with my HA system (Nest, Alexa, Hue, Siri, Ecobee, Doorbird, video, weather, ect.)
It looks to me like OpenLuup has the strongest eco-system of apps, and largest matrix of support for what I need (without a monthly fee).
My plan is to migrate the Vera devices to a new zway "server" and then use OpenLuup with her apps. Am I on the right path?
I currently run a OpenLuup "client" "on" my vera "server" as a "bridge"
Am I correct in understanding that the zway server is currently the most proficient back-end engine?
TIA
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Hi prophead,
I think you understand correctly.
The best integration server, supporting the widest range of APIs is actually home assistant. Being open-source and having an enormous amount of developers and maintainers, I don’t actually foresee any commercial solution catching up to it in the short term.openLuup in terms of integration offers a lot too but not nearly to the same degree as Home Assistant. openLuup benefits from being able to run all of the plugins developed for vera for years. What it does have though is two main advantages: The automation interface, and scripting, what you call the front end, is far easier and very powerful with the use of lua. In that respect, many Home Assistant users end up running also Node Red which offers this similar advantage compensating for this weaker area of home assistant. The other advantage is, if you come from vera, is the ease of migration and familiarity... you can have all of your scenes and plugins pretty much seamlessly transferred over and now with the z-way bridge, you can also transfer the devices without including/excluding.
Now on the back end, the wireless stack and device manager, z-way and HomeSeer are both far ahead of the seemingly abandoned vera on the z-way side. On Zigbee almost anything is better than vera as it was never really invested in it. After trying pretty much every platform, I found z-way to be the most advanced, most flexible and most powerful zwave manager. It’s weakness is in the front end which is why I use openLuup there and have also bonded Home Assistant to openLuup manually to add all of the Home assistant integrations to openLuup while retaining and expanding my former vera codes and automation.
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Thanks for this thoughtful and informative reply, it’s really helpful.
What do you have in HA thats not in OL? -
I have a lot of integrations:
BMW Connected drive (Car location, status, AC, lock control)
Eight Sleep
Brother Printers as sensors
Xiaomi robot and air filters
Facial recognitions on all my IPcams.
Foobot
I also use it as my zigbee bridge (using the vera's radio chip)
unifi POE switches so I can power cycle everything POE controlled.All of these are bridged back into virtual devices in OL. OL remains the master controller and HA is just a device bridge. It either triggers scenes, updates device variables on OL or executes device actions commanded by OL.
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I have to ask; brother printers as sensors?
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Yes:
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You have a couple of local options:
And there are additional ones cloud based, one of them is:
Microsoft Face Identify
Instructions on how to integrate Microsoft Face Identify into Home Assistant.
You will notice from the version introduced for these components that these are 2-3 or even 4 year old capabilities so forgive me for chuckling at what is going on in the "other place".
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Just to show you how it looks like on the ALTUI/OpenLuup Dashboard.
And compare to the top screen of HA.
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I'm having 6 outdoor IPCam and think to take the one you proposed for the "ring" at the front door!
Right now, all of them are just connect in Synology "Surveillance" but I would like to have something more "intelligent" for sure!
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Can I run both HAss and openluup off of the same zway server?
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You can. The API is not exclusive.
