Thanks for letting me beta test the vera. I was previously using the Hawking Home Remote and found it limiting and frustrating.
the vera setup was painless and trouble free. Very satisfying experience. I am building a home in 2009 and I am running a test system currently with various brands of plug in controller Z wave modules running lights in the house. I have rooms, devices, and scenes set and all runs well. We usually use our iphones for control.
Here is my problem. I would like to add a z-wave remote to control my set up scenes. I have the Intermatic Home Settings Handy Remote controller ( it came with my hawking system). I followed the instructions on vera and those with the remote and Reset the channels and networks to clear the controller, then I followed the instructions to add the remote as a secondary controller ( Devices/Z-wave options/Send Z-wave network to a secondary controller). Now, when I go to Devices, I see “Z wave controller” listed on the “my home” list of devices. ON the little pull-down menu next to the red squaare, a blank page comes down. (photo attached, I hope)
Question: what am I doing wrong? Can I use this remote to control scenes? Isn’t that one of the main purposes to use a z-wave remote? Huh
thanks in advance
-dale
PS: get an error every time I try to attach a 54kb jpg photo.
At present, ZWave controllers are blissfully unaware of each other. They will all have all of the devices in them. And you should be able to individually control the lights, except that the Intermatic controllers don’t give you direct node control. The early belief by the ZWave guys was that you would copy the scenes from controller to controller, however each controller has a different way of defining the scenes internally so it only works between identical controllers. If you have, for example, a Leviton controller it will allow you to locally create scenes in it using the same lights. however Vera won’t know when you activate a scene, except by analyzing changes from the polling (not done yet!!!). And I don’t believe you can send a command from one controller to another, at least I have not yet seen an implementation of that.
What you are asking for makes a lot of sense. Especially implemented through a scene controller back to Vera to control things outside of ZWave. I’ll look into the protocols and see if there is anything in there, but I don’t think so, yet. . .
OK, so a z-wave remote can’t be used to control scenes at this time.
The Hawking also could not do this. With the Hawking, there was a workaround, I set up the Z-wave remote to turn off a particular light ( say, a large Torchiere lamp) Then, I was able to set up the controller to “turn off all lights” when it detected that the torchiere was turned off. The opposite occurred when the torchiere was turned on. In this way, I was kind of able to use the z wave remote to set some scenes.
I can’t figure out a way to get vera to recreate this phenomenon. Obviously, it would be under events. Event type: " A device is turned on or off"
Under Event Type, there is “what device?” but to the right of this there are NO parameters to choose from. Shouldn’t there be a drop down menu of all the z-wave devices I have on my system? The next down thing is On or off Event parameter and the place to put the event parameter value. But don’t I need to specify the exact device for the system to watch for the event?
