I’ve been searching and searching and can’t find an affordable way to simply measure the temperature accurately. I’ve tried the Aeon Labs Multisensor, and it’s a piece of junk. It is just astronomically inaccurate. Now I’m gonna order the HomeSeer HSM100-S2. I don’t know how good that will work, but it’s kind of pricey. Does anyone know of a cheap and accurate way to get temperature reading to Vera?
One way would be to find the cheapest thermostat for which there is a Vera plugin, and just power it without connecting it to HVAC equipment. Another solution would be to solder up your own thermister(s) to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and write your own plugin (using pieces like this: http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/temperature-xrf-development-sensor-thermistor/), but I’m sure there are easier solutions than that. I am also interested in hearing what simpler solutions there are out there.
watou
You could look at the EDS One Wire Server ([url=http://www.embeddeddatasystems.com/OW-SERVER-1-Wire-to-Ethernet-Server-Revision-2_p_152.html]http://www.embeddeddatasystems.com/OW-SERVER-1-Wire-to-Ethernet-Server-Revision-2_p_152.html[/url]). It’s about $100 for the interface box, and the sensors are a couple of $$ off eBay. They are reasonably accurate (probably more so that most of the z wave interface boxes). The EDS sensors are quite nice, and if you want humidity, pressure etc, then use them, but if you just want temperature, just get the DS18B20.
Unfortunately it’s not wireless, but it does mean you don’t need to change the batteries 
Plugin is here [url=https://apps.mios.com/plugin.php?id=1488]MiOS Apps.
Chris
I forgot to mention that I’ve had the “Z-WAVE Water Freeze Sensor WWA-02 $59.99” since August in the basement near the boiler and it’s been running reliably on the one battery since then. It did have trouble reporting the battery level for awhile, but it cleared up with a button press. I don’t know how reliable its temperature sensor is, but it does routinely update.
watou
Can you elaborate a bit? (Off by a fixed number (how much?), or all over the place, multiple units with the same issue, etc.)
Was it USB powered, or battery powered? What were your ‘wake-up’ and ‘poll at most’ settings?
Can you elaborate a bit? (Off by a fixed number (how much?), or all over the place, multiple units with the same issue, etc.)
Was it USB powered, or battery powered? What were your ‘wake-up’ and ‘poll at most’ settings?[/quote]
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Some of these might be promising. Please let me know if you know of any other solutions…
The Aeon Labs sensor always shows temperature as being anywhere from 2.5 to 8 degrees (F) hotter than it actually is. For example the room temperature could be 73, but this shows it as 80. It’s all over the place, but ever since I left it constantly plugged into USB, it’s gotten worse. It wakes up every 4 minutes, but even after messing with custom parameters (111, 112, 113), I couldn’t get it poll reliably more than every 12 minutes. After a day or two of working, it would just stop sending temperature reading. So then, I setup a scene and manually poll it every 5 minutes using Luup code. Since then, the polling has been very reliable, however the temperature reading is sooooo wildly inaccurate that it makes the whole thing completely useless. By the way, it wouldn’t even work with Vera without upgrading the Firmware to 1.18 and upgrading Vera to the latest beta firmware. It’s just been horrible and as soon as I find a better solution, I’ll send it back. So, if you guys know a more accurate solution, please let me know.
Thanks. Interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen that with mine.
FWIW, currently an outside one reports 0.5F lower than a non-Z-Wave temperature sensor in the same location. And another outside one is 1.5F below that reading, but it’s in a different location.
Set up a test unit on USB and having it push the sensor values every 10 seconds. The temperature does not appear ‘jumpy’, but I’ve only looked at it for 20 minutes. It reports 68F, the thermostat 10ft away is set to 68F and the HSM100 (V1) near it reports 68F.
Polling issues (while on batteries) may be a combination of a short ‘awake-time’ of the sensor, Z-Wave routing and the response time in Vera. The HSM100 might do worse.
When you moved to USB-power, did you exclude the sensor and include it again?
Just to give you guys an update, I ended up buying another z-wave thermostat on sale for $60 along with a 24v transformer, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s been extremely reliable and accurate. I wanted to use this to basically create a third AC zone in my house and using some Lua code, I’ve achieved excellent results. Now, I can fully control one of my AC units from the Master Bedroom and the night time temperature in that room is consistently very pleasant 
Which thermostat did you buy?
Borrowing the thread a little bit, hope this is ok…
Would it be possible to run owserver on a raspberry pi, and have Vera poll it? I have already a rpi in a place for ser2net, and I’d like the temperature in that room as well.
@vespaman, I am doing something similar to what you suggest. In my case I use OWW weather station which uses 1-wire devices. It is running on a Linux box with some code that writes a JSON file. On the Vera side, I have a modified version of Underground Weather plugin that reads my JSON file and parses it. Doing this makes a lot of sensor available to my Vera.
Chris
So ChrisK, I haven’t used underground weather but am I to understand that you are kind emulating it with your code, by presenting different kind of sensors - not just temp?
This sound very interesting, need to read up on oww weather now.
So many OW solutions out there… :-\
@vespaman Well sort of. I put together a OWW (One Wire Weather) station years ago. It is really more than weather. I have one wire sensors all over my house, from my freezer to the attic. I even have a one wire light sensor so I can see how much sun my garden gets. So when I saw guessed’ Underground Weather plugin I thought that would be cool, but I want to use my own data.
So I wrote the code to take values from my sensors, along with forecast information I pull down from NOAA and write into a JSON file on my web server. I modified guessed code to go my web server and pull the JSON file over instead of going to the Underground Weather. Doing so has allowed my to easily make data available to my Vera. It is just so much easier, at least for me, to add sensors and information to my Linux box than to try and add them directly to Vera.
Chris
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If you Google their Twitter account, some times they have coupons and discounts. Last time I got 13% off.