I know most people will use ZWave for lighting, but my house already has Lutron RadioRa installed. I purchased these many years ago when I was playing with Premises. Anyhow, I would like to use MCV and seeking advice of how to best incorporate my existing Lutron RadioRA integration. I already have the Lutron RS232 serial unit as well. I also have a Glocal Cache laying around somewhere as well, thus I maybe able to integrate via Serial->IP->MCV?
I just got back to this hobby again and a newbie to MCV. In fact, I just ordered the MCV unit and some new accessories… thermostats, locks, cameras.
Again I know post people here may not care about the Lutron RadioRA lighting. I am new to Vera and must say that’s a great unit with the right balance of out-of-box features and still allows user to customize. If Vera organizes (removes any outdated one as well) their wiki/documenation better, I think it should not be too hard to built most IR/Serial plugin.
I wanted to thank this forum to help me get started on this project. After many hours of trials/errors over the weekend, I got Vera to turn on/off/dim my Lutron RadioRA lighting system. So far, I basically created a D_LutronRadioRA.xml (from D_DimmableLight1.xml) which in turn uses the the exising standard S_Dimming1.xml, etc. I then created a few services/actions in the implementation file. I will finish the rest of the actions after reading the Lutron APIs. I probably will spend more time reading the Luup lang as well before finishing up this plugin.
If anyone has any input/tip that may help me with the rest of the task, I would really appreciate. I would also really appreciate any pointer to the zwave dimming implementation files (if such thing exists ).
Communications:
Vera 2 → Global Cache GC-100 → Lutron RadioRA RA-RS232 Interface
Hi, this is a very timely discussion as I’m trying to do the same thing. I too have a Radio Ra system and am wondering if it can be controlled via the Vera 2? I see you’re using the global cache product and writing a plugin for Vera to do this work. It seemed to me that you could connect the vera to your RS-232 Lutron Ra device via the usb port on the Vera and issue your serial commands to control your Radio Ra devices that way. Does that seem reasonable?
Thanks for any info you can provide. I haven’t pulled the trigger on making this purchase as I want to know how difficult this will be before I buy this device or something else.
If it can be attached to a GC100’s Serial port, then it can be attached to a Directly-attached [MiOS verified] USB-Serial connection or a Network attached Serial port - they all “look” the same under MiOS.
You may want to PM @mhang to see if they’ll publish their code (as an attachment to the other thread) so you can see what it does and if it’ll cover what you need.
Thanks, I’ll do that. As a newbie, I do have another question however. Once upon a time several years ago I used Homeseer to control a house I did using x10, etc. One thing I liked about Homeseer then was the ability to script actions. Homeseer had a library of objects that performed various actions and you could call them via javascript or vbscript… I can’t remember. The point is, they already had an object for handling serial communication. You just needed to use it.
I got the impression that Vera could do this as well, but you also have the added benefit of writing these objects yourself if there was missing functionality. Am I way off?
There are MiOS Luup API’s for doing native IO, along with the underlying Lua ones for HTTP, Sockets, FileIO etc, etc. You’ll see examples of Plugins written with these on http://code.mios.com, along with examples of Scene scripting in the Wiki and throughout the Forums. There are examples for everything from the very simple to the very complex, so there’s a wide array that can be done with it.
But, for this level of integration, it’s a lot simpler…
Most things Vera will interface to will be connected to a Serial Port. But this Serial Port could be a real, direct attached, RS-232 device (USB-RS232 converter) or it could be something that Vera can talk to over your LAN (via TCP)
You then associate, via the MiOS UI, one of these Serial Ports with your Device (like the RadioRA Plugin that @mhang appears to have started).
This association is done declaratively and the code of the Plugin doesn’t change for any of these “Serial” like devices you might want to talk to.
Actually the referenced GC100 is an example of that. It’s a Network-attached RS232 Port, but any plugin written to work with that will work just as easily with a native Serial Port, just by changing the Serial Port config for it in the MiOS UI.
As an another example, with a single Plugin codebase for my Panasonic TV, it can be controlled over a Direct USB-RS232 adapter, an Ethernet (Cat5) Ethernet-RS232 Adapter, or a Wifi-RS232 Adapter - without having to write it to handle each of these different types of connections.
Got it. Thanks so much! I took a look at the Panasonic TV plugin doc. It looks really simple to reuse this for Radio RA and just replace the config and commands.
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