I am a IT guy by trade, and an addon on my house allowed me to put in a few Leviton VRI06-1l units, and they work great.
What im trying to do is get easy, nice control with easy nice IOS/Android options.
My current setup is using the controlthink USB adaptor and a zVirtualScenes system running on a windows machine. Im a 100% mac guy, so its a pain in the butt. I use a Lightswitch app on my iphone, which is ok, but not super nice. I want the lite to replace this setup
So, what my questions are. I want a nice IOS app (from the looks of it, I have that option), I can run my different zones, or lights or scenes (turn this light on to 50%, this one at 20%, but that one off etc)
I am also looking to see scheduling. I want to turn certain lights on at 7am at 20% (good for kids), and I was wondering the option such variables like ‘I live here, I want to turn on this light at dawn for 4 hours’. Can I do that with this device? Nicely? Easily?
I want to jump into this, and then I have a few friends that are interested as well and are waiting to see how it works for me.
All pretty trivial with Vera.
There are multiple IOS and Android clients … I use the Android variants …
I tend to use the Web based interface only for setting things up.
I am biases (i.e. I wrote) the Day or Night Plugin. This provides a useful way to have a variable time relative to sunrise and sunset. (You can add a different offset to each, this allows you to define how dark or light it is before it toggles).
I would also recommend the Program Logic Event Generator (PLEG) program over the standard Vera Scenes.
The main reason is that if you have any logic more than the Logical Or of it’s inputs … you have to drop into LUA/LUUP (an interpreted scripting language) to express your logic. With PLEG you focus on the logic and not a bunch of details that aren’t important to solving the problem.
Just for clarification: do you have any Leviton scene/zone controllers, or just the dimmers? That is, you mentioned ‘zones’; do you mean a Leviton zone specifically?
Thanks for the responses. Sorry for my delay, some reason I didnt get an email upon reply I will need to look into
Ot@: I just have the dimmers, I call each one a zone, sorry. I have just different dimmers/switches
RichardTSchaefer: Sounds like this should work for me.
I am just trying to get out of a virtual machine running windows for such a small application. This seems the fit, with a lot of options going forward. I simply want to plant the veralite in my house, config it, and have it wife-proof.
As has been mentioned, all that you’ve said can be done with Vera.
One thing that folks seem to trip over with Vera is event-based vs. device-based control. I find it’s best to think of Vera as event-based. That is, “It’s sunset. What should I do?” And set devices to that. You can add timers like you want to–i.e., shut off after 4 hours. Pretty straightforward stuff–especially if you’re already familiar with HA control.
Another thing that you can do (which also increases the WAF) is associate devices together through Vera. For example, I have 6 devices in my exterior lighting system and when I hit any one of the switches, all 6 go on/off (this of course isn’t required). You can associate switches with outlets. Motion sensors with other devices.
As for iOS control apps, there are several good ones that talk directly to Vera units. FYI, watch out for iVera. It works well, but it seems to be abandoned by the developer and it’s a bit expensive.
I think its a good fix. The software I am currently using is great, but the IOS side of things leaves a lot to be desired. Getting a veralite and putting it to work seems like its going to be easy, and effective, all at the same time.
Thanks again
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