After growing increasingly frustrated that my ceiling fan controller is merely seen as a dimmable light, I decided to have a go at writing my own plugin to control it, rather than waiting for someone to do it for me!
That said, I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I need your help please. I have created a .json file and I believe I also need a complementary .xml file for the device and the fan speed control service itself. I believe I have created the .xml for the services correctly but I am now stumped at the fan speed control service. Since the fan controller acts like a dimmer I think I need a way to pass the four different variables (off, low, medium, and high) through the services file at the correct values. Presumably these will be:
0 = off
33 = low
66 = medium
100 = high
If anybody has any idea what I’m talking about, can you please look at the attached files and point me in the right direction to get this working? I would really appreciate it!
You can’t, unfortunately, create your own device-type for a Z-Wave device. Vera assigns a device-type according to information received from the device during inclusion. The Z-Wave handler only supports known device-types.
What you could do is to create a virtual fan controller that translates your Off/Low/Medium/High state to the equivalent LoadLevelTarget and sends that as an action to the existing device. Ideally you would also watch the device’s LoadLevelStatus and convert that back to show the actual fan state. This requires an Implementation file in addition to the Device, Service and Json files that you have already created.
See Luup Plugins for more information on Implementation files.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll see if I can’t educate myself a little through the link you provided.
I had hoped that I could create all these files then modify the device types of the existing devices to point at these new files, but it sounds like things don’t work that way…
I have three of them and they work great. The only annoying thing is setting the speed with a percentage slider in Vera when it has three preset speeds (well, four if you count “off”).
Richard, I have no idea how I would even go about starting with your suggestion, but thanks very much for the input.