Vera PushOver notification with image

[prophead]

So if my vera will as it will want to restart after removing each zwave device and I have say 35 devices what are the chances it survives 35 restarts? How do I explain to my wife that our HA system is unstable? Yes, I know backup first.

[akbooer]

I can assure you that your Vera will have had at least 10, if not 100, times that number of restarts already.

[prophead]

Right now everything is very stable after removing every app except day/night, system monitor, and virtual switch. I may just learn zway for a while before I break whats working. The manual is 300 pages ffs. The alexa, siri and hue integrations are working perfectly and hard fought if you know what I mean. The writing is on the wall and there will come a day, and very soon that my alexa, remote access, and ios app stop working. When that happens I hope to be ready at least with the new hardware. Ill leave it to ezlo to determine my schedule. Honestly I would pay a reasonable monthly fee to keep those services going.

[rafale77]

The 300 pages are really for developers. I think you can browse around and figure out how it works. The interface is pretty intuitive.

As for your integrations, they all work perfectly on openLuup so you can just toss the vera out an keep them. Did you see my post about the local integration of alexa and siri? They are faster, more reliable and more secure than the native vera one by a long shot.

Your network size is right at the edge of where things get iffy on the vera. If like me you had notication setup to be sent every time the luup engine reloads you would really know how often that thing crashes. It is not reliable under any condition by any stretch of the imagination. It is a matter of not catching it when it crashes because you don't have it do anything at that moment.
Kind of what the forum manager in the other place was saying: As long as you don't make it do much you won't feel it to be unreliable... and likewise I would add the new platform is lightning fast as long as it does nearly nothing.

[akbooer]

@rafale77 said in The death of a thousand cuts:

As long as you don't make it do much you won't feel it to be unreliable...

Absolutely! Here’s what happened to my Vera Edge when I stopped asking it to do anything ZWave-related...

[prophead]

It is just such a big job to move everything over. I have no doubt I can do it and it will be better. I would rather defer the large time investment and do more productive things. Even if I use the zwave backup method it will still take a considerable amount of time. What is going to be the best replacement for my native ios vera app? Altui is nice on the web but not as nice on my phone. My vera app has current image from camera in each room that has one. Ive not seen that on openluup. I Haven’t tried impirihome. I’m loath to upgrade things that are working. I do automated forced vera reboots every night and I believe that has helped keep my system more stable I have been doing this for the last few years at least

[akbooer]

Have you tried HomeWave? The developer @intveltr uses openLuup. Actually, we should invite him to this forum.

Yes, you can get camera images in openLuup (and email triggers.)

[rafale77]

@akbooer said in The death of a thousand cuts:

Have you tried HomeWave? The developer @intveltr uses openLuup. Actually, we should invite him to this forum.

Yes, you can get camera images in openLuup (and email triggers.)

+1 on Homewave and inviting @inveltr over. It is basically what eZLO is trying to sell with their mobile app and their dashboard and is already ages old. It much better than the vera app in terms of configurability and can be run completely locally, bypassing the cloud servers.

[therealdb]

I think that @prophead is referring to the ability of the Vera's native app to run with nothing exposed from the inside. I have my automations and my own bot, but my wife is using the app a lot, because - of course - automations are never what they really want at that precise moment.

So I have the same problem and I'll probably just expose my openluup installation via a reverse proxy, authenticated. This and the amount of work necessary to migrate the scenes/Vera features (like status associated to home mode changes) is holding me back as well. I will complete it because my Vera started a reboot cycle every 20 minutes since sunday and it's frustrating, and I'm wondering if this could be easily done or not. I will know it soon, I guess

[rafale77]

@therealdb said in The death of a thousand cuts:

I think that @prophead is referring to the ability of the Vera's native app to run with nothing exposed from the inside.

A bit more work but there is VPN for that (also with a dynamic DNS). It enables you to access your entire network so it can be used for a lot of other things. I undertand using a mirror server from the outside to tunnel in through your vera is convenient but it really isn't all that secure and not under your control. That's how I view all my cameras and access my NAS along with a bunch of other things remotely.

[therealdb]

Yep, I know, since part of my job is to deal about security. But the tunnel is convenient and while I can build it on my own, it's another thing to maintain...
Thus, it's very complicated for the average wife

For my NAS/Cameras, I use Synology's built-in tunnel and it work OK. Files are mostly in cloud, so no need to use the VPN anyway.

[prophead]

@akbooer how do I do room images from cameras?

[prophead]

My bridged cameras from vera don’t work

[akbooer]

@therealdb said in The death of a thousand cuts:

work necessary to migrate the scenes/Vera features (like status associated to home mode changes) is holding me back

openLuup has a tool to migrate scenes, moving trigger and action references to the local device instances.

It also supports house mode, is able to mirror a remote Vera's modes, or get a remote Vera to mirror its own house mode (or, indeed, sync the modes of multiple Veras.) The openLuup plugin itself has an action to set house mode which can be used in a scene, and also a mode variable which can be used to trigger scenes...

[akbooer]

@prophead said in The death of a thousand cuts:

My bridged cameras from vera don’t work

No, they don't. But I assume that they are IP devices, so can be accessed directly. openLuup has a built-in implementation file for cameras which supports images and also creates a child security sensor which can be triggered by email (without the need for any internet access, since openLuup implements its own SMTP server.)

[prophead]

Do i create new device? What do i put as the device and implementation files?

[therealdb]

@akbooer said in The death of a thousand cuts:

openLuup has a tool to migrate scenes, moving trigger and action references to the local device instances.
It also supports house mode, is able to mirror a remote Vera's modes, or get a remote Vera to mirror its own house mode (or, indeed, sync the modes of multiple Veras.) The openLuup plugin itself has an action to set house mode which can be used in a scene, and also a mode variable which can be used to trigger scenes...

I now, I played with openluup a lot, because it's the best dev platform for plug-ins hands down. But, as you now, moving from staging to production is always challening. Your customers are always there to point their fingers you if something goes wrong. And when you share the bed with your customer, well, things can get pretty intense

BTW, I was referring to Vera's ModeSetting variable, as we discussed with @rafale77 on Vera's forum. I know this is a bad implementation, but that's what I used because it is in front of you and it's easy to play with. I planned to write a plugin for it, but I'm busy at work and I postponed. It's a one-time effort to migrate, but another thing to add to the TODO list nonetheless. What I'm saying here is that I understand @prophead position and I know it's just anxiety, but not so complex to do. Probably just time consuming, as you need to

[akbooer]

@prophead said in The death of a thousand cuts:

Do i create new device? What do i put as the device and implementation files?

Yes, one native to openLuup, rather than bridged from Vera.

I'm not a big user of video (or audio/TTS) but I have a Foscam camera that a very nice person in Australia sent to me for helping them with their HA setup. I've just fired it up on my RPi system and all is working (as I expect it to, at least.)

D_DigitalSecurityCamera1.xml
I_openLuupCamera1.xml

Just tried to post some screen snapshots, but the forum is throwing an error...

...anyway, suffice to say that a thumbnail appears on the AltUI devices page and on the control page itself you get a larger image.

This is after having set the URL and DirectStreamingURL variables of the device, plus the IP attribute, including port number.

[akbooer]

...I should also add that the ArchiveVideo action works for individual snapshots (using Format = 1) with the files being stored in the images/ folder and available to browse from the Images page in the openLuup console.

On the openLuup console Sockets > SMTP page you should see the camera IP as a registered email sender, along with a count of the number of emails received. You obviously have to configure the camera to send these. On the POP3 page you can actually browse the messages sent as triggers, but the child security sensor should also behave as expected (if armed.) I have an old iPod touch set up to browse these internal emails via the POP3 server using the Mail app.

If you have lots of messages/images being sent, you can configure timed scene to use the openLuup plugin's SendToTrash and EmptyTrash actions to enforce file quotas based on filetype / age / number of files.

[DesT]

@therealdb said in The death of a thousand cuts:

my own bot

Can you elaborate?