Backgroud:
Legrand has a collection of lighting control devices (which includes RF devices) in a line they call adorne. Up to this point, I’ve been using legrand’s own scene controller which while it’s easy to set-up, is pretty limited in terms of flexibility and of course does not directly integrate with any other home automation.
Within the past couple weeks I purchased Vera Lite (UI7) for the purpose of controlling a couple Kwikset locks. I thought that would be the end of it…then I learned of the rather “open” nature of Vera and in short order had my OnQ garage doors and Sonos system integrated with Vera. It’s only natural to want my lighting integrated as well.
Of course, the RF technology Legrand uses (“Top-Dog”) is not a compatible protocol with Vera. However, Legrand does offer a “serial-to-top-dog RF” controller (Model MR-232G) that should be well suited to do the job of interfacing between Vera and my lighting devices.
I’m a “self-taught” coder, very proficient in VBA…at least it’s more or less object oriented and event driven. However, I have no experience with luup, uPnP, java script…basically no unix, XML. But I’ve decided to try my hand at building the plug-in for Vera.
So I’m going to use this thread to document my trials, take suggestions, etc. At the end of it, I hope to have a plug-in / app that others can use that would do the following at a minimum.
- Installs the parent control (the serial-to-rf controller)
- Search for all Legrand lighting groups and automatically create a Vera dimmable light device to control it. (With legrand devices and control, you technically don’t control individual devices, you control device “groups” of one or more devices paired with one another.)
- Expose all relative actions (on/off, dimming / ramp rate, etc.)
- Use Vera’s already built d_DimmableLight1.json for the UI7 interface.
After that potentially include any of the following
- Polling for group status so that the user interface control properly reflects the state of the lighting group / responds to events. (On/Off - dimming level).
- Provide an interface to be able to programmatically bind controls together to form groups, rooms, etc. (Currently this is only done with the controls themselves.)
- Differentiate between groups that can dim and ones that are strictly on/off, and bind it to the appropriate Vera device (dimmable light vs. switch power)
Good luck to me! ;D