I’m impressed with Vera so far.
When I upgraded to 1.0.292, I had to restore settings from a backup.tgz file twice before the device labels were restored. The first time they had the generic labels.
My test setup is pretty straightforward. I’ve got a Leviton RZCPG-0SG controller, a mix of Leviton dimmers and lamp modules, as well as an Intermatic CA9000 PIR sensor and an Intermatic HA05 screw-in lamp module. I access the Vera from a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.5 with Firefox 3.0.3 by going to: http://192.168.81.1/
I’ve made the Vera a Slave controller by including the Vera’s dongle in the Z-wave network and then I used the “Copy Z-wave Network from a master controller” button. This pulled over all the devices, but not the text descriptions from that I had set in the RZCPG-0SG. ThinkEssentials was able to grab the descriptions just fine. Is this a bug?
Question: What advantages/disadvantages are there for keeping the RZCPG-0SG the master controler? Or vice versa? I understand that only a master controller can optimize the network. Is that true? Can the vera do this yet?
Question: The dongle has only one button, how can you use it to exclude a device? I’ve often read that when adding a new node that you exclude it before including it so as to reset it.
Editing the devices was pretty easy, from a UI perspective I’d move the Red SAVE button to
be more in the flow of the operation rather than off to the side.
Controlling the modules from the Devices tab and clicking on the Test areas works fine.
On the Devices tab, it’s not clear what the advanced options on each of the nodes do, nor was it clear what if anything I can do with the CA9000 PIR. It’s associated manually with the screw-in lamp module and works fine, but it doesn’t report any status as far as I can tell. The Arm and Bypass buttons don’t seem to do anything either.
I created two scenes and have noticed several problems. One scene turns off three lamps/dimmers. Another scene sets one to 50%, one to %80 and one to On. I seem to
have to click twice (at least) on the Go buttons in order to activate the scenes. The “Off”
scene works fine, but the “On” scene is setting the level on one of the modules to 100% not 50%. I’ve attached screen shots of the scene configuration. [This does not work, Can’t add attachments!]
Occasionally, I’ve seen 404 errors in the subframes on some of the pages. This seems to be better with 1.0.292.
What I’d like next:
I’ve got some Leviton scene controllers i’d like to install. Rather than the default method of using them whereby the scenes are setup in the scene controller, i’d like to be able to use the scene controller to activate scenes stored in the Vera unit. This would have lots of advantages in my opinion.
Same goes for the PIR sensor.