I installed VeraAlerts and checked out Vera Alerts - Vera Plugin for Notifications to set it up. However, I am having some difficulties with it. My goal is to send text messages for some scenes and emails for other scenes. The description says “The Vera Alerts Plugin looks at the Set of users and converts that into a Set of Profiles to send the Notifications to”. I have three users in vera (“User Info” and 2 in “Other Users”). However, after installation when I go to VeraAlerts->Profiles I don’t see anything. I expected to see profiles automatically created based on the user info. It seems I misunderstood the quoted comment above. So what does that comment mean?
It seems “VERA-Alerts-Lan” is for sending (text) messages “Vera Alerts Mobile LAN sends message right from Vera to the Mobile App without any intermediate stops.”. However, the inputs are “Host”, “Port” and “MessagePrefix”. Nowhere is there a phone number to put in. So what is this “VEAR-Alerts-LAN” for and how do I send text messages?
Also what is the “Notification Configuration” for? It seems alerts actually have to be defined within the scenes by going to “Advanced Editor”->“Add Action”->“#xx VeraAlerts”->“Send Alert” and then set the message, recipients, etc. So what is “Notification Configuration” doing?
You create PROFILES first … a profile determines the technique used to send a message to a target. i.e.
You can create a profile to send an Alert to a specific Android Phone using Vera Alerts Mobile
You can create a profile to send an Alert to a specifc IPhone using the App Pushbullet on the IPhone.
Each Profile has a unique name (That you can define).
In the Settings tab you associate one or more profiles with each user. Once setup is complete then:
The Vera Alerts Plugin looks at the Set of users and converts that into a Set of Profiles to send the Notifications to.
Notification Configuration has two purposes:
It provides you a way to change the default message (Specified by MCV) to something more meaningful to you.
You must open this tab every time you add or change a notification. The process of opening this tab is where Vera Alerts discovers the current notifications in the system.
When you use the Advanced Tab with Scenes … that is ONE way to send an Alert via Vera Alerts. But this is NOT a notification as defined by MCV.
Notifications as defined by MCV are setup using the Notification Tab of a Device … or as part of a trigger for a scene (UI5) or as a consequence of running a scene (UI7).
Thanks. That explanation is much clearer than the one on the website. Unfortunately, I am still having a hard time to configure VeraAlerts. Right now I am getting the VeraAlerts but I also get the alerts from Vera. On the web documentation it says “Process Notification: If enabled, Vera Alerts will handle notifications in parallel with the standard MiCasaVerde handling of notifications”. I had this enabled which would explain why I get both the Vera and VeraAlerts messages. Therefore, I disabled it but I still got messages from both.
Then on the web documentation I read “Notification Configuration: … In this tab you have the option to override the default message associated with any of the Notification you have created in Vera.” Based on this description, it seems I need to enable Process Notifications to overwrite the Vera messages (in contract to the above paragraph). Also, when Settings->Process Notifications is disables I can only see some but when I enable Process Notifications I can see the scenes I need. So I enabled “Process Notifications” and set the “Message Override”. However, the “Process Notifications” is always being reset to unchecked. This is despite the fact that I click on “Reload Luup” which actually does not seem to do anything. However, if I wait for a while I can see the blue messages on top that Luup is being restarted. When I refresh the browser and go back to VeraAlerts “Process Notifications” is unchecked again, though.
I must have tried at least half a dozen times to set the “Process Notifications” without success. Now I finally got it to work. The only difference to before is that after enabling it I waited a bit longer (even after the blue bars passed saying Luup is reloading). Also, re-reading the web documentation, I realized I have to disable the vera notifications in vera, i.e. they are not intercepted and replaced by VeraAlerts. I am not sure what the following means: “Process Notification: If enabled, Vera Alerts will handle notifications in parallel with the standard MiCasaVerde handling of notifications”. In other words, if it’s disabled, it will not be processed in parallel but what does that mean?
Also do I really need to use Pushbullet (I have an iPhone) to get text message alerts? Isn’t there a way to get text messages from VeraAlerts without having to install another app on my iPhone?
If you want to get text alerts via SMS than the notifications supplied by Vera will work … You do NOT need the Vera Alerts plugin.
The problem is there is a limit … also it has had reliability issues … The messages do not show up as from the same user … so they are not grouped.
That’s why people use Vera Alerts. It provided more customization options.
If you are still getting text messages or emails then you have NOT turned them OFF from you Vera Account
(i.e cp.mios.com for UI5 or home.getvera.com for UI7)
If you use Vera Alerts plugin … you usually turn the alerts off in your user account(s).
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