I’m a completely new user of Vera and purchased a Veralite to get started. I’ve been looking all over for documentation and have been extremely disappointed. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places. Just to get started I have one appliance adaptor. I’d like to set it up to turn on a light at sundown and turn it off at 11:00. This seems like a pretty simple thing to do. I can figure out how to set up a scene. Then, I want to add a trigger. I figure it must be a MIOS trigger I want to add but when I make that selection nothing seems to happen.
Vera appears to be quite capable but the documentation is so poor (or outdated) and the user interface so non-intuitive that I’m thinking of abandoning this project. Anyone got any examples or pointers to dealing with these trivial functions?
This is where you went off-target. If I told you that sunsetty things are schedules can you figure it out?
(I’m not disputing the lack of good documentation, BTW. There is a lot of poor documentation whose presence is hurting new users. If MCV could figure out the minimal amount of documentation that is sufficient to get beginners going that would be better than too much documentation.)
I was initially a little overwhelmed with the user interface (and I am a programmer) but after a little tinkering it was fine. No pain, no gain is the watchword here. Give it a real chance. If you are still overwhelmed after a few days, then fine. In the meantime the support on the board is amazing.
Thanks, folks, for the encouragement. I’m starting to
get the hang of this a little although there must be
a better way.
The way I did it was:
I created two scenes, one with the lights on and one with
the lights off. Then I creates a schedule for each scene,
one which runs at sunset (the ‘lights on’ scene) and one
which runs at 11:00pm (the ‘lights off’ scene).
Is this really how I go about doing this or is there a short
cut where I can define one scene and say “all on” and “all off”.
Or should I use a room of some kind?
thanks for the help, I’ll get going somehow. (Still seems
like it should be a “MIOS trigger” but oh well.
Using two scenes is the best way to do it. One of the first things that I had to “get over” was thinking about each device individually and instead think more “globally.” In other words, what things do you want to happen at sunset? You’d create a scene for sunset and then set all the devices that you want to control (as opposed to setting a sunset action for each device independently.)
I also advocate a “suspenders and a belt” approach. In other words, I have my indoor lights come on about 15 minutes before sunset. Then, at sunset, the outdoor lights come on (and along with this sunset scene, I also resend “on” commands to the inside devices that I turned on 15 minutes ago.)
I also have two separate scenes called “All Lights On” and “All Lights Off” and I include every lighting device in both scenes. These are more for safety and security than anything else. For instance, if the security system is triggered, it will trigger the “All Lights On” scene.
Feel free to ask questions; lot’s of help here.
Dave
You’ll be interacting with Vera at the console level which can be dangerous if you’re logged in with root access. But once you’re good and familiar with your logs, they can help a great deal with troubleshooting.
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