Made My Vera Stable using Home Assistant (This is AWESOME!)

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On VeraSecure unit #2. Started experiencing issues so I took a different route. I installed Home Assistant on a mini-PC that was just collecting dust. Right out of the box, something I had a LOT of problems doing was simple in Home Assistant → running a scene where EITHER of 2 motion sensors is tripped AND the light level is below XYZ THEN turn on the light for 10 minutes. It worked in PLEG in Vera but took forever to do. In Home Assistant, being a new user, it took a couple of hours. (I had to learn the proper way to format YAML.)

Here are the things that I’ve configured to work in less than a week of tinkering:

[ul][li]automated complex scenes[/li]
[li]Google Home integration (IT’S FAST!)[/li]
[li]rtsp Cameras work! [/li][/ul]

Other wins: Since I removed all third party apps from the VeraSecure - it seems more responsive. (Or maybe it is Home Assistant that is more responsive??) The Home Assistant app LOADS IN SECONDS on our cell phones and tablets. (I repeat - LOADS IN SECONDS) And I’m sure this will all add to the stability of the VeraSecure since all it has to do is communicate with the Z-Wave devices and Home Assistant will handle the rest.

1 Week In with Home Assistant and now wish I had tried this 6 or 7 years ago!

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gniknalu,

This sounds and looks very promising. If I read this correctly, Vera is essentially relegated to managing device communication on the z-wave network and automation logic is managed by Home Assistant. It also looks like there is an easy migration path - let Vera handle the automation that is currently working and enhance the home automation by using Home Assistant for more complex tasks and for integrating applications / devices that Vera doesn’t support. A quick look on the Home Assistant website and I see that HA support Sony’s Songpal (Audio Control API) and IFTTT - two options I have waited on Vera to support for years.

Look forward to hearing more about your journey.

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[quote=“Bb98, post:2, topic:200273”]gniknalu,

This sounds and looks very promising. If I read this correctly, Vera is essentially relegated to managing device communication on the z-wave network and automation logic is managed by Home Assistant. It also looks like there is an easy migration path - let Vera handle the automation that is currently working and enhance the home automation by using Home Assistant for more complex tasks and for integrating applications / devices that Vera doesn’t support. A quick look on the Home Assistant website and I see that HA support Sony’s Songpal (Audio Control API) and IFTTT - two options I have waited on Vera to support for years.

Look forward to hearing more about your journey.[/quote]

Thank you for your comments.

Yes - that is accurate. I have offloaded ALL non-essential tasks from my VeraSecure and moved them to Home Assistant (except for notifications - I am still holding back on that part). Even with an exchanged/refurbished unit, the VeraSecure would still crash (or stall) daily. Since making the change, the VeraSecure only crashed once in the last 2 weeks. (The same “crash” my other unit experienced - see another post with the YouTube video.)

Since this original post I’ve further customized Home Assistant - making groups and adding additional pages. I’ve also enhanced the Google Assistant support to the point where other family members are using it with ease. The camera “page” I created on Home Assistant has integrated rtsp feeds from 3 different brands of cameras. Also started work on dealing with our home audio devices. They’re IN Home Assistant (because of auto-discovery) but haven’t taken advantage of them - thinking of using Google Assistant to say things like, “OK Google - play James Brown on the upstairs soundbar”.

I’ll post more as things progress.

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A number of us are doing similar things with openLuup but Home Assistants adds a much broader integration so I actually have an instance of Home assistant do all the integration and have them report back into openLuup.
So I basically have openLuup do all the logic and some of the API device integration, Home Assistant do most of the API integrations, and Vera is just a device hub.
The advantage of openLuup is that you can move all of your logic, zwave devices and plugins directly from the vera. With Home Assistant to have another learning curve on the automation side. I am not quite sold yet on Homeassistant’s zwave device handling and representation with group and tabs. I still prefer openLuup/ALTUI.

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Thank you for the idea of using openLuup! I’ve heard of it but never give it a glance.

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This sounds really interesting. What about the security stuff? Can I control Home/Away/Vacation/Night mode for Vera Secure from HA?

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If you run openLuup, it is completely transparent. From Home Assistant you still can do it. Just a matter of writing some code.

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Everything on my Vera works fine in Home Assistant. In fact I started using home assistant to handle my home vs. away. It works with my locks and my home security system as well.

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I looked at openLuup and decided it would require too much effort whereas with the vera integration in home assistant, I was up and running in minutes

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I can vouch for HA as well, my Vera is now just a ZWAVE hub, so much better and I finally have a good use for my R_Pi which was just lying in a drawer.

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I went a step further and bought a $45 Aeotec Z-Wave Stick and plugged it into the back of my 10 year old Ubuntu workstation. The only thing running on Vera at this point are my Nest devices (because I can’t move them).

The learning curve on HA is pretty high, but once you get the hang of it, there is almost nothing that cannot be done. It even directly supports my iAqualink system. To make that work in Vera, I was going to have to buy a Nautilus and connect it to the Jandy. With HA, direct support via the API.

Vera is a great idea and very user friendly, but after 2 years of constant device hangs, I cannot rely on it for security or anything beyond lighting control. I will check back in a year to see how things are going.

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I tried using Home Assistant the learning curve is pretty steep. But man it really does control everything!

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I’m another Vera + Home Assistant user. One thing I missed in HA (which Jesfer mentioned) was being able to access and affect the House Modes. So I wrote some code, and have been happy ever since!

Here’s what it looks like in my HA interface:
image

All of the code, and instructions, can be found here: GitHub - brgerig/HA-Vera-Modes: Integrate Vera House Modes with Home Assistant. This updates when the House Mode is changed in Vera, and also changes the mode on Vera when changed in Home Assistant.

I hope some of you find it useful!

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I’m giving the HA/Vera mix a go and am so far liking it a lot. So far I’ve been stumped trying to setup dimmer behavior to be the same as Vera is by default. Every time I turn on lights via HA, they go to 100% brightness instead of keeping the last state prior to turn off. I have yet to figure out how to turn on a given light to say 50% brightness every time. Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks,

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This is because you HA is using a different command to turn the dimmer on than vera.
Vera only sends on on command while HA sends a “set dimmer to 100%” command. You can ask on their forum how to modify this behavior.

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I tried this approach about a year ago, just to try Google Home and Xiaomi integration… HA works well, but theres still stuff I like in vera that i didn’t find a good HA substitute for…

  • Good Geofencing (stable when using iPhone locator for iPhones)
  • Remote connection without a paymant plan
  • Reactor! (no coding involved in building fairly advanced automation)

Admittedly all these are probably easily doable in HA with some tinkering, but when 7.29 came along my Plus got som much better, i ended up staying with it… (dodged the 7.30 bullet too)

Today i’m using Reactor for all House-mode, Geofencing and Scene work, and it works really well.
So unless the Plus gets sluggish with the (much) larger network i’m building now, i’m probably sticking to it. :slight_smile:

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Same here. 7.3x made it really better for me. I have a quite complex setup involving external devices, and still ha is not in the production mix yet. I admire their frequent updates and extensibility, but overall I’m good now with Vera. I just want a couple of things to be finally fixed, frankly, but it’s getting better than in the previous years.

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I agree that HA doesn’t have everything the vera platform has: some plugins and ease of setup. Even though it is getting better, it is still changing and a moving target in terms of learning curve. However it also has a lot of integrations the vera doesn’t have so that’s why the best compromise is to run both somehow. My approach has been to run HA as an integration hub to @akbooer’s openluup using @rigpapa ‘s sitesensor to bridge a dozen device variables and a few scenes to command Home assistant. This part was worked marvels. I have a vera like structure interfacing with @amg0’s ALTUI and automation coding with full home assistant integration capabilities.
The weakest link remains the vera’s zwave handling which I am working now on replacing with zway… and am already halfway there.

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And HA is currently going through an identity rebranding which is causing a little confusion for users. Personally I have been running HA in a venv with the latest version of Python. Others prefer Hass.io but I prefer to choose what plugins I can and cannot install, hence my choice of platform.

Let nobody be under any illusion. HA is not without its difficulties and the whole experience can be overwhelming for some. I have noticed that a number of very experienced users have drifted off to platforms like OpenHAB and similar platforms owing to “in house” politics but I imagine all communities suffer the same fate at some stage.

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When I decided to take a serious look at alternatives to my Vera, I went down the path of using the HA to Vera integration to provide a path backwards if needed as well as to help with the gradual migration.

I started by figuring out how to duplicate all of my PLEG automation in HA. YAML kinda scares me, so I used Node-RED which, after a bit of a learning curve, is very easy to use and has support for some key integrations (like my Roborock) with simple add-ons. Some other API-based interfaces I simply ‘built’ using Node-RED. Different than PLEG + Lua, but more powerful and easier to debug. But after I got my automations all working (with Vera as the device interface), I felt more confident in HA as a replacement solution.

The first device transition was to HA’s Zigbee support which went very smoothly and was orders of magnitude better than Vera for my Keen vents and other Zigbee devices. And as I migrated more and more to HA, I simply deleted those items from Vera and rebooted. Along the way, I kept making incremental Vera backups and HA snapshots so I could revert at any time if needed.

The toughest migration was my Legrand Adorne switches & dimmers. After almost breaking down and writing my own integration, I stumbled across someone who had created a very simple broker between the Legrand interface and MQTT which I could leverage in HA. Not the easiest step, but the overall performance and reliability is now better than on my Vera.

The second last step was a Zwave migration which was made easier because I only had about 10 Zwave devices. Just like with my Vera, enrolling my Yale lock was truly a royal pain, but I got there in the end.

One area that Vera still shines is the out of the box UI. HA has a lot of very cool tools, but effectively requires you to build your own user interface if you want something simple and user friendly. That was the last step for me before mothballing the Vera. I eventually used a community-supplied theme that was easy to customize and looks good on any device. A very high WAF and very easy to grow out as I add more capabilities. At this point, my HA now does about 150% of what my Vera formerly did. No more getting nervous about proprietary hardware or being afraid to upgrade firmware based on previous bad experiences.

Home automation is never really simple, but I’m very happy with what I have now and it’s a vast improvement over my Vera. I’ve been using Vera for a very long time (the last one was my third Vera) and felt increasingly boxed in with the platform. HA has issues (especially with documentation) but it has a very viable community and near constant additions that I can leverage.

My Vera now sits in the pile of disused tech and will soon end up at the recyclers. It’s been an interesting ride. Anyone looking to start a similar journey would be wise to do what I did and initially leverage the HA Vera integration. Where you go from there is dependent on how much time you wnat to invest to meet your particular needs.

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