Hi guys,

Does anyone know if the UZB supports Long Range already? I can't find which chip is in there.

For all systems backup is a vital part of the long-term usability.

I thought that I describe my set up with Z-way so far. Hopefully others can fill in with their backup thoughts as well. I am sure that there are much more streamlined ways of doing this and hope to learn from you all.

I run Z-way on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a daughter RaZberry card. In order to reduce the risk of getting corrupt SD cards I have it running off an SSD. So far this works very well. Setting it up was really easy just reading a standard Raspbian image onto the SSD. The only minor obstacle was that I had to test a few old 2.5" enclosures to find one that the Pi liked.
The Pi is then also powered via an UPS, hopefully this will avoid problems in the event of power outages.

In order to backup Z-way I have so far done manual backups from the regular Smarthome backup & restore function creating .zab files and from the Expert UI creating .zbk files. As far as I have understood the .zab files which are bigger contain more information than the .zbk files. The strategy so far has been to make backup files after each inclusion/exclusion. Also before updating Z-way. I have yet to test restoring from these files.

From Smarthome it is also possible to set up cloud backup. I have not yet set up this as I need to decide that it is safe enough to do so. On the other hand I had this set up on my two Veras.
It would have been nice to be able to schedule a local backup of Z-way instead of having to put them in the cloud, perhaps from OpenLuup via the Z-way bridge?

In addition to the built in backup function I try to do complete image copies of the SD cards on my Pi's with Win32DiskImager. When I moved to an SSD the image file grew to the size of the SSD since it is a raw copy including all the empty space. Image files of 160GB are not practical to handle so I found a good instruction on how to shrink the .img file with Gparted in Linux: https://steemit.com/raspberrypi/@wizzle/shrink-raspberry-pi-images-using-windows-virtualbox-running-raspberry-pi-desktop
By shrinking the .img file with Gparted it is now a more reasonable 4GB. These file are stored on my NAS for safekeeping. The strategy here so far is to make a new image file before updating Z-way and to use these in combination with more frequent Z-way backups.

I have tested restoring a Gparted shrinked .img file to the SSD when my Z-way for some strange reason became unreachable through the regular UI but remained reachable through the Expert UI. Always good to test the restore function and to see that it works. 🙂

The downside of the .img strategy is that I need to power-off the Pi for a while when making the backup. However if the Z-way backup files work then the complete .img backup need not be done so very often.

//ArcherS

Anyone here that has visualized the location from iphone locator in grafana?

found the "World Map" panel for grafana, but haven't figured out how to make it display yet..

@akbooer, I just woke up to a z-way bridge token expiration again forcing me to login again and reload openluup. It appears to happen once a week. It doesn't appear that the auto renewal of the token is working?

Probably @rafale77 will jump on this question first 😉

I'm using the new model of GE/Jasco switch (they replaced the dead one I got) and the new model is having also S2 security and send instant status update BUT,

And probably @rafale77 will say yes, is it possible that interference can do that I'm missing some instant update status ?

Often, I'm having the wrong status in the zwave.me web interface...and even clicking the icon, the status didn't changed to right one.

I also try to do some "On/Off" using the web interface, and the device itself physically, toggle without a problem, but the web interface is still no correct.

@akbooer

Do you think it could be possible to have a custom device for "dimmer" that instead of having the slider from 0 to 99 will give us Off/Low/Medium/High and will send 0,30,60,90 ?

One of my aqara sensors suddenly stated that the temperature in the garage passed +650 degrees.. I checked, and it wasn't. 😉

Both humidity and pressure is reading normal levels - i guess this must be a HW error?

Its not dead either, just severely offset:
13d464d7-8a77-4740-95bf-6ed3a59515b8-image.png

Plugin for Amcrest/Dahua Cameras on openLuup. Contribute to rafale77/Amcrest-Dahua-Openluup development by creating an account on GitHub.

So, I was bored to see all those "device not responding" banners in the Alexa app and I created a new plug-in:

Luup plugin to syncronize Vera/openLuup status to HA-Bridge and Alexa. - dbochicchio/Vera-HABridge

This will update your devices' status to HA-Bridge and Alexa will finally reflect the correct status!

Just install, insert the HA-Bridge IP and port and you're done. It will work with lights and scenes (scene just to update the status and remove the "device not responding" banner). Colors are not supported, because

It will work with Vera bridged on openLuup, but HA-Bridge accessing the Vera's device directly (there's a special variable, look at the logs).

Very beta, feedback appreciated as always 🙂

I hope they'll add a way to query the status via voice soon 😉

I have optimized my facial recognition scheme and discovered a few things:

My wifi doorbell, the RCA HSDB2, was overloaded by having to provide too many concurrent rtsp streams which was causing the streams themselves to be unreliable:
Cloud stream
stream to QNAP NVR
stream to home assistant (regular)
stream to home assistant facial recognition.

I decided to use the proxy function of the QNAP NVR to now only pull 2 streams from the doorbell and have the NVR be the source for home assistant. This stabilized the system quite a bit.

The second optimization was to find out that by default home assistant processes images every 10s. It made me think that the processing was slow but it turns out that it was just not being triggered frequently enough. I turned it up to 2s and now I have a working automation to trigger an openLuup scene, triggering opening a doorlock with conditionals on house mode and geofence. Now I am looking to offload this processing from the cpu to an intel NCS2 stick so I might test some other components than Dlib to make things run even faster.

Curious to know if anyone play with Z-Uno to create some "z-wave sensors"

Current Hardware: Vera Plus, HA in Synology Docker
Firmware: v.7.0.31
Available SW / HW: Multiple RPi's, Z-Way UZB w/lic, Z-Way Razberry board
ZWave Devices: 30-ish early gen GE/Jasco light switches

Issue: I've gotten myself into a spot that I'm not quite sure how to safely get out of, and I'm hoping someone on this forum can help me. I would ultimately like to get to a point where I'm using Home Assistant in Docker on my Synology as my UI for turning on/off lights, but I've read the "Pyramid" post and am open to other options. I can currently ssh to my Vera Plus, but cannot access the web UI (get a 403).

How I Got Here:

Back in Feb'19, I followed @rafale77's instructions to take my Vera off the grid. At the time, it looks like I was running version 7.0.26. This worked great.

I installed HA in Docker w/socat on my Synology NAS, and things were running perfectly for a long time, but I was forced to upgrade HA in tandem with an upgrade to the iOS app. So, I chose to use a Docker build that already had socat built in.

Then, I saw that there was a new version of firmware for Vera, and decided to upgrade to Firmware v.7.0.31 around Apr'20. This was a mistake in a big way, and I sought help on the new version of the Vera forums, which eventually led me here. I also re-ran @rafale77's mod files on the newer firmware version, and I think I shot myself in the foot there. I knew it was gamble, and take full responsibility. I've learned a lot and have benefitted greatly from his work.

I tried to run the Nuke Vera script, as that sounded exactly what I needed my Vera to do - take commands from HA and nothing else. This seems to be working, but I'm unable to control my network with HA.

Additional things I've done / tried / worry about:

Validated that HA is sending and receiving responses via socat from the Vera in the HA openzwave logs. I see logs that seem to indicate that a message is sent, and a message comes back from the Vera, but lights don't turn on/off. I've clicked the Heal Network, Test, Network, and Soft Reset buttons in the HA UI too.

I purchased a razberry. Then, I ordered a UZB, after seeing this post about migrating, assuming that it was best to try to follow that guide verbatim and not have to exclude / include a bunch of devices. I'm leaning towards completely divorcing myself from Vera.

I'm not 100% sure I have a valid backup of my zwave config. There are no dongle.dump files in /etc/cmh whch may make sense, as I was using after an external drive w/extroot. I do have some in ./mnt/sda2/etc/cmh/. It looks like I've got extra, actually, as it looks like I probably made backup copies some where along the way.

I shutdown the Vera and removed the extroot drive, reversed all of the changes Nuke-Vera made to the init.d start up files, and rebooted. I did this because the migration guide mentions to set the path of the z-way UZB in the UI settings, and I couldn't find how do this over ssh. I also don't know how to backup the zwave config from the CLI and was going to do this via the UI. As mentioned previously, I'm getting a 403 "Access Denied" message. Looking at logs and the config for lighthttpd, I think it is trying to follow some symbolic links that no longer exist, but I'm hoping I can get out of the mess I've made without troubleshooting and solving the HTTPD issues. I think I just need to know how to follow the steps to clone the Vera to the UZB via the CLI?

I found a command online method that allows me to view the zwave keys with hexdump. The keys on the device are different than the keys in on the drive that i was using for extroot, and that concerns me a bit.

If you've made this far, thanks for your time! Does anyone know the best way for me to get myself out of the mess I've got myself into?

All the best,
Michael

I made a video with a first look at Multi-System Reactor. In this video, I show the major components of the system, and run a demo automation where a light switch on HomeAssistant controls a light on my house Vera Plus.

This project is coming along nicely, but there is much documentation to write, and lots to "to-do" list items yet to be implemented, most on the critical path to working outside of my own hands, but a few still are.

Comments and feedback welcome.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/EcdPLnd2ybo

Rumble: https://rumble.com/vccph1-preview-of-multi-system-reactor-first-look.html

Chat with me on Discord: https://discord.gg/B3FDcBNR

Quite a number of years ago I set up a few Arduino sensors that reported temperature to my VeraLite running UI5. I did this with MySensors, a quite nice community based platform.
I discontinued this mostly because that the combination of a rather flaky Vera and that the Vera when rebooting lost the USB connected gateway.

Some time ago I started to look at this again, but this time using ESP8266’s and Tasmota. I think the credit for this partially is the plugin for Shelly and Tasmota that @therealdb has written, even though I have still to use the plugin. The other reason for reentering into this area is that my electrical supplier is replacing the electrical meters for a new smart meter. Today I use a blink meter from Effergy, but the new meter will have a port for reading out data. This also led me to Tasmota, there seems to be a functioning solution for this.

I must say that Tasmota is brilliant! Support for all kind of devices and sensors and super easy to use, also for multi-sensors, OTA update, good documentation etc. You can get parts on ebay etc quite cheap. It has also so far been very stable. You can also very easily adjust the sensors readout, e.g. TempOffset -1.5 gives an offset of -1.5 degrees.

I have put together sensors for temperature and humidity for use in the garage, the outhouse, on the attic etc. I have tested DHT22, DS1820B, BME280 and BH1750 so far and they all work without issues. The latter two I installed in an outdoor enclosure to use as a simple weather station reporting temperature, humidity, air pressure and light level.

I also got a MH-Z19B CO2 meter for testing to monitor the indoor CO2 levels. The initial feeling is that it does what it should.

In general I have pretty good wifi coverage with a few Unifi access points. One of the sensors is in a building some 25 meters from the house where the wifi is not that strong, but the NodeMCU has no problem with this. Quite impressive and a good addition to Z-wave for that kind of location.

Not owning a 3D printer I have had to resort to purchased enclosures and the old Dremel. 😊
For the CO2 sensor I put it in an old smoke detector enclosure for now.
I am sure that there are a lot of talent here that can do much better with a 3D printer!
CO2meter1.jpg

HumTemp2.jpg

HumTemp1_.jpg

You can get the data from the Tasmota devices into OpenLuup in a number of ways. The obvious way is via MQTT. I have still to set this up at some point in time. The second way is to use the excellent SiteSensor plugin. I tested this but had some problems with reporting stopping after a few days for some reason. I probably got something wrong in the setup. The third option, that I currently use is via adding rules to each sensor. You can quite easily add rules for reporting data to a virtual sensor in OpenLuup, e.g:

Rule1 ON tele-AM2301#Temperature DO Var1 %value% ENDON ON tele-AM2301#Temperature DO WebSend [IP_adress:3480]/data_request?id=lu_action&DeviceNum=65&id=variableset&serviceId=urn:upnp-org:serviceId:TemperatureSensor1&Variable=CurrentTemperature&Value=%Var1% ENDON

With TelePeriod you can change the polling interval as required.

This method I think could be super useful for reporting back e.g. switch status from a Tasmota node much like I understand Shelly can do.

Some resources and notes I made on the way:

Using Tazmotizer to flash the ESP’s is very easy

List of supported sensors including how to connect, commands etc

A good pinout reference for ESP8266 variants

Tasmota rules documentation

Most sensors are either “Generic (0)” or “Generic (18)”, check for each sensor type what to use

For I2C sensors e.g. BME280 one must use tasmota-sensors.bin

For the MH-Z19B I had to flash the ESP before attaching the sensor, this could be a good practice always

Use the following url for the query in SiteSensor:
http://IP_address/cm?cmnd=Status%2010

This became a rather long post but hopefully it can be of some use.
//ArcherS

@akbooer

I'm a fan of the SendConfig call action in a couple of scene...

Did you implement something like GetConfig ?

I have a couple of scene that I would need to do a GetConfig to do something based on the value...

I was trying to change the ID of a couple of scenes and came to the conclusion you can't do this without stopping openLuup, hacking user_data.json and restarting openLuup, which is a pain. (May be this could be added to openLuup ie be able change any scene ID to a non used one.)

So I figured I would try and clone some of the scenes with the idea that I could then manually swap their contents around. Why would I want to do this? Just to make my scene management a bit more simple as all my scenes call the one pile of Lua code. I also wanted to make use of unused scene IDs sprinkled through the scene ID list.

My understanding was the clone would occupy the first unused scene ID. Using AltUI, it just adds the clone on to the end of the list of scene IDs. In openLuup using the console page it failed to create the clone. Hits the URL OK:

Says this in the log:

Searched high and low and no clones to be found.

I see that AltUI does a create when it clones:

Any ideas?

Hi

Go with me here... I recently pick up a unresponsive Vera Secure from eBay for next to nothing, thinking I’d could have a go at trying to restore it, if only as a play thing..

Situation - The power led comes on, but the internet and service leds just flash - no connection made (and even using a direct cable and Wireshark, I can’t see an arp request being made to see if it has a default in address) - I’ve also tried various reset button combinations - no luck.

Perhaps this post is a long shot, but seeing so many familiar ex Micasaverde/Vera forum names - i thought I’d at least ask - just in case anyone had any guidance/advice etc. I could use ..

I'm trying to monitor the indicator command class of a 5 button scene controller in Z-Way so openluup can properly create and track it.

seems like Z-Way COMMAND_CLASS_INDICATOR (0x87 or 135) are not being monitored by the ZWave module as I couldn't find anything for this command class in (/z-way-server-path/automation/modules/ZWave/index.js)

When a Get or Set Indicator command class request is sent to the controller. ZSniffer picks up the request and response just fine although this packets are not being monitored by the zwave module
Example:

the answer looks like:

I’d like to store the Indicator response “RECEIVED” correctly. I believe by modifying the index.js of the zwave module could do the trick and once the module start tracking the indicator command class values as a metric then openluup's z-way plugin would properly track any changes as well.

I'm wondering if anyone around here could share any thoughts or comments that could make it easier...