I replaced my Vera 2 with a Veralite a while back. I had originally planned on selling the Vera 2 to a friend but that ended up falling through, it’s since just been sitting in my closet gathering dust. Is there any way I can use it to increase the range/quality of my current network? I haven’t really been having any problems but if it can help I might as well use it.
Whilst not quite the same thing, I have 3 Veralites sitting on the same Ethernet, two running separate Z-Wave networks and one running all my apps. Works for me, perhaps something of the same flavour will be good for your configuration.
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the advantage of running 3 different veralites like that?
Yes you can bridge two Veras to expand the zwave network range. Search the forum for “bridging” for details. Actually I ended up doing the external aerial mod to my Vera3 and gained range that way.
I now use my Vera 2 as a standalone testbed to try out new devices / plugins.
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Speed and reliability, or, in a word, robustness. It’s also a matter of necessity. Two of the Veras (#1 and #2) have networks in physically separate buildings, but I want to see all of the devices in one place, so they are both bridged (one-way) to Vera #0. Scenes and apps essential to local Z-Wave devices (such as scenes triggered by local MiniMote controllers, and virtual switches) exist on #1 and #2, but, for the most part, the more exotic applications (dataMine) and code which monitors or controls the whole property (include non-Z-wave devices controlled over IP such as Netatmo) live on #0 which has no local Z-Wave devices.
If I restart one machine, the others are not (significantly) affected. None of the machines is excessively loaded either in terms of memory or CPU cycles. Vera #0 is my software development machine and often gets restarted several times a day, but on the others I (almost) never get unsolicited Luup restarts.
The downside is that it is more of a pain to administer. In particular, adding a new devices to machines #1 or #2 also requires they be renamed and placed in the right rooms on Vera #0. But, on the whole, it works extremely well. When the next generation hardware comes along I can upgrade #0 and then redeploy the old one on another Z-Wave network.