Best posts made by tamorgen | Smart Home

tamorgen

I just ended it doing it from scratch. It only took a few hours to go from room to room, exclude, include, etc. Home Assistant includes devices much faster than Vera. The biggest headache was waiting for Vera to reload itself every time I removed a node, that and moving both Vera and Home Assistant from room to room, plugging in, and waiting for them to boot up.

The other headache I ended up dealing with some of my battery powered devices. More specifically, I had problems with my iBlinds motors. I could connect to them fine when my Home Assistant RPI was in the room, but the minute I put the RPI back in it's home, which is the same location Vera was in before, I lost all communication with those devices. I spent the better part of yesterday fighting this.

I let Home Assistant heal the mesh last night, and tried again this morning. They still were being listed as "dead". I started digging a bit more into the HA community forums, and I came across a post that said that plugging the Zwave stick directly into the USB port is a known problem, and that there can be interference from the Pi board itself. I found an old USB extension cable, and moved it about 3 feet away, and magically everything joined back up!

At this point, I've pretty much migrated off of Vera. It's kind of bittersweet. Vera worked pretty well when I started off years ago, but the lack of development from Vera, together with the instability of their servers, and the lack of forward momentum on the Ezlo front put me fully in the Home Assistant camp. Thankfully MSR has made that shift much easier, since I was able to use my same rules from Vera and use them for my new HA.

tamorgen

@toggledbits
Thanks Patrick, that did the trick!

tamorgen

@Pabla said in Is it possible to use a single reaction for multiple entities as variables?:

Don't use the play button next to the action, use the play button right under set reaction

Well that makes a difference! This has been driving me nuts all afternoon. Thanks for cluing me in!

tamorgen

Figured out the issue. HA has moved crap all over the place over the past year, and some of those directions in the other thread are out date. Here is the problem I found. It still leads back to @Pabla 's comment about only one instance running.

When I went to HACS --> Add-ons, I saw a screen, with only Z-Wave JS UI. If I go to Settings --> Add-Ons, it shows Z-Wave JS and Z-Wave JS UI.

I went into Z-Wave JS in the Add-On screen, and changed the Start On Boot to off, and all of a sudden, the Z-Wave JS Controller connected.

Crazy!

tamorgen

I'm just getting started using MSR. I'm currently using iPhoneLocator as a plugin on Vera, but I'm looking eventually to retire my Vera and move to Ezlo. Ezlo has on their roadmap native Geofencing, however, if it's anything like Vera's, I don't see it being particuarlly reliable. I found iPhoneLocator to be much more reliable. Unfortunately, the developer has said he has no plans of migrating it to Ezlo, so I'm stuck with waiting for Ezlo to devlop theirs, or keeping Vera running at the same time as Ezlo, and using iPhoneLocator as a Geofencing solution through MSR.

I would like to see something self hosted through MSR.

tamorgen

@CatmanV2

Welcome to the HA community. I stuck around with Vera for about 8 years, and kept waiting for Ezlo to live up to it's promises, as support for Vera dwindled and fell behind. Last September I took the jump to HA, ported all of my Vera native Reactor rules to MSR, and haven't looked back. I'm amazed on how much more I'm able to do with Home Assistant, and the stability improvements are night and day.

I'm running my HA on a stand alone RPi4 as well. I run MSR on my home NAS server. A word or two of advice I would give you, is make sure you run it on a SSD and not the microSD slot. Faster performance and much better reliability. And of course, run backups of your HA configuration (Google cloud is a good solution for this).

tamorgen

Good morning all,
First, I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself. I've been using a Vera Plus for about 8 years now, and the luup based Reactor for two or three. Before that I used PLEG for my home logic on Vera.

I've been monitoring the evolution of Ezlo, and I'm starting to consider making the jump to it. After discussing with others over on the Vera/Ezlo community, it seems that it's not an all or nothing switch, particularly with the Patrick's MSR, so I'm joining here today to start taking a look at it.

Anyway, that's my basic post. Look forward to playing with MSR in the near future.

tamorgen

@CatmanV2 said in Smart bed sensor:

The Ex-Vera abuser know as CatmanV2.....

HA! Vera abuser or abused by Vera? I know I felt abused when I switched to Home Assistant just about a year ago.

tamorgen

@toggledbits said in First post:

Haven't used Fedora in a good while (although I'm a Berkeley guy), but most *nix has the which command you can use to find the path that a command lives in: which node

That did it. I always forget that command!

tamorgen

@toggledbits Thanks Patrick. I'll edit the post title.

tamorgen

@therealdb said in Using Google Calendar data from HA in Reactor:

There’s a part dedicated to dates in the docs. I think the best approach is to parse the date from the attribute and compare day and month part to start/end. Everything is covered under expressions in the docs.

I figured the issue out. All the documentation in HA had been telling me to use haas_attr: offset_reached to cue to the calendar event, which seems to work in Home Assistant when creating automations, but not in MSR. What I found through a bit of trial and error is that what I'm actually looking for is haas.state (primary).

Once I figured that out, adding conditions based upon hass_attr: message, which is actually the calendar title.

tamorgen

That would do it . I thought I was in my home directory.

tamorgen

@gwp1 said in iPhone location or alternative.:

@tamorgen If you're using Home Assistant look into iCloud3. It replaces the native iCloud integration and is much, much more reliable. You can find it in HACS.

Oh - and the level of detail you can pull into MSR is wonderful.

I did try it for a while, but I kept getting annoying emails from Apple that my iCloud account was signed into. There is a ton of detail on it, but frankly, all I needed to know was whether a particular user was at my home or not. The companion app works perfectly well for that simple task

tamorgen

@gwp1 said in iPhone location or alternative.:

@tamorgen I found the trick of triggering from iC3's zone_name within MSR virtually eliminates false GPS drift from suddenly shutting my house down around me only to open it back up again when it course-corrects.

I don't get those emails - I think I did initially and don't recall what I did to stop them. iCloud does, now and then, force a reconfirmation dialogue but that's easy 2FA stuff.

You know, looking back, I don’t think I was using IC3. I think I was using the Apple ICloud integration native to HA, not HACS. I’ll take a look at a closer look at IC3. Might give me some added functionality I don’t know I need

tamorgen

@toggledbits said in Need help with DynamicGroup reaction for dead nodes in HAAS:

EDIT: The screen shot should have a line group_actions: true following the filter_expression line, with the same indent.

I saw that in the block code when I was adding it to my instance. Thanks for pointing it out.

Now I'll have to watch the logging to see if it gets triggered.... that and notifications sent to my phone.

tamorgen

@toggledbits
New information: I created a new rule, and the "less than" operator does save properly. The issue seems to only be the case when changing the restriction operator on existing rules.

I also tried to change that newly created rule restriction operator from "less than" to "at least", and just like my other existing rules, it failed to save after the change.

I hope this helps.

tamorgen

@toggledbits,
I just tried another method for verification. I tried making a copy of the rule, and editing that copy. I'm unable to change that restriction operator on the newly copied rule. I'm assuming it saves it when the rule is copied, so when I go to edit that restriction, it acts like an existing rule, and will not allow the change to be saved.

Please let me know if I can provide any more information.

tamorgen

@toggledbits,
Final piece of the puzzle. If I change the sustained seconds value itself, I can change the sustained operator. I'm now able to correct the rules operator, but I have to change the seconds value along with the operator for it save properly. This is a work around, but no matter what I to do, the restriction operator cannot be changed by only changing the drop down.

I hope this makes sense and you can reproduce it on your end, to determine the cause. If you need anything else from me, please let me know.

tamorgen

@gwp1 said in [SOLVED] New iblind and zwaveJScontroller/MSR not communicating:

Further, I just discovered if I do a reinterview on an existing blind via ZWaveJS in HA it switches to this new Window Covering mode.

For what it's worth, I have both v2 and v3.1 iBlinds in my home. Reinterviewing only changes the type from multilevel switches to window covering on v3.1 blinds. Version 2 blinds remain multilevel switches after reinterviewing.

The Window Covering class is supposedly better. The MLS class is designed for rolling blinds, so on/off will have the bllinds all the way open, or all the way off. With horizonal blinds, the 0/100 values are just 180 degree opposites of a closed blind. With Window Covering class, I believe there are values to tell the Z-Wave system what type of blind it is, and specify what is open versus closed. I dealt with iBlinds support maybe 4 or 5 months ago, and at the time, no Z-Wave system supported Window Covering. Zwave JS implemented the change shortly thereafter.

tamorgen

@toggledbits, it's going to take soem time to wrap my head around everything you posted, but it's great to know it's possible!

MSR UI on a mobile browser

New to Home Automation Looking for a Single app?

UZB/RaZberry Firmwares - Update

Sending data to a USB port to interface with a wireless switch

Seeking Advice:

[Reactor] Assignment to alarm ignored -- expression-driven global cannot be set by assignment

[Reactor] [Dev] Clarifications/Docs for refreshCapabilities and Entity action implementations return types

Looking for Remote Switch boxes that can also be used with a wireless Decora Style Switch.

Openluup - verabridge can not load devices.

Access to log file viewer denied

Why different types of Triggers within openLuup & ALTUI

High temperature sensor for Zigbee

Darker Reactor style

openLuup_install.lua - URL changed?

Just starting what hub is best.

TTS in MSR?

OpenLuup : Loading Global Modules

Should MSR import this device type from an Ezlo controller?

Reactor (Multi-System/Multi-Hub) Announcements

A couple of things about Reactor 24293

tamorgen

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