I’ve been trying to use a ZDW120 Dimmer to control scenes with my Vera Lite.
The dimmer has a group association if you double- or triple-tap it. In order to trigger a scene in that group, I figured I need to put a virtual switch in, and use the state of that switch to trigger the scene.
However, the problem I’m having is with setting up the virtual switch:
If I use the VirtualSwitch plugin, or if I manually set one up (using D_VSwitch.xml / I_VSwitch.xml in the “Upnp Device Filename” / “Upnp Implementation Filename” fields in Develop Apps/Create Device) without a parent, then the device can be added to Vera. However, it is not recognized as a device when setting up the group in the ZDW120.
All the other zwave devices are under the parent ZWave. If I manually create a device in the same way and select ZWave as a parent (or any other parent for that matter), then the device will appear and be recognized as a selection in in the ZDW120 group. However, that virtual device will disappear after about 1 minute.
Changing the VirtualSwitch plugin’s parent seems to be an option, but I get this warning:
Changing the parent of a device may brick your Vera. Are you sure you want to continue?
WTF? That’ll brick the Vera? Needless to say, I haven’t attempted it…
Does anybody have suggestions how I can get the virtual device to remain under a parent?
(I’ve also tried using the D_ files for Binary Light and Dimmers, but the same thing seems to happen regardless.)
Thanks.
Group-association is a Z-Wave only construct. It’s built into the devices themselves, and can’t be simulated through Vera.
In general, you cannot “Parent” one device to another… actually not sure why they provide that functionality in the UI at all, since it breaks things in all sorts of ways when you do it 
To do this, you’d need to have something that provided an event, similar to whatever the Group-association behavior is, and trigger a standard Vera scene from that event. Typically only the side-effect of a Group-association trigger is seen by Vera (light on/off, etc) and not the fact that it was triggered by the GA.
They call it the Advanced Tab for a reason.
And unless someone that knows what they are doing, tells you to make a change … you should NOT change anything there … Do not believe everything you read … even on this forum!
Except from me ;D
Unless the Dimmer supports Instant Status it will not be useful to launch automation (such as scenes) in Vera … Because Vera might not see that you turned the switch on or off until the next poll interval (Several minutes). I am not familiar with this dimmer.
Folks searching for Switches can also use the keyword “HAIL” (the Leviton command), since it was more commonly used in the early postings.
It can still be done by scenes without this, it just won’t be real-time/responsive. In some use cases, this is fine, it really depends upon what people are trying to do with it.
eg. Sending an alert when a Light is turned on is probably OK to be “delayed”, since there are already high-latency things in the delivery pipeline.