Have a Vera Lite and I’m growing tired of the various issues.
Not enough space to upgrade firmware (that’s been going on for years)
Keep losing connection to devices that are in the same room (not responding)
A plugin that SHOULD be working on all platforms doesn’t work on the Lite and no one from eZLO wants to help
I’ve been eyeing possibly moving to a Plus, but I’m wondering what my alternative options might be. Any thoughts on something RPi-based or similar? hass.io? Home Assistant?
Chamberlain garage doors aren’t officially supported on most platforms, but something that CAN support them unofficially would be great.
Having been on the fence for sometime and having tested almost everything locally processed from Home assistant to Homeseer to Hubitat to Zway, I can probably speak to it.
The problems you are facing, I have faced too and as of today, almost any other controller will be more reliable than your vera. I have moved from a lite to an edge to a plus, staying mostly because of how heavily invested I was in the plugins and automation I had developed or customized which would take a lot of efforts to migrate. I have actually moved my plugins and scenes to openLuup and many API integrations to home assistant. The three working in harmony but with the vera being the weakest link in terms of performance and reliability. If I was to start from scratch, I would likely have chosen either Hubitat, Home Assistant. Homeseer can get expensive and is essentially zwave only but also the fact that it is windows based (even the linux version is heavily emulated) just drove me away. Hass.io is just home assistant installed in a container and I would not recommend using a pi because it really isn’t an improvement over the vera.
However… There is hope. The new firmware 7.0.30 for the edge/plus appears to be a game changer. A number of us, developers are testing it now. The new management, ezlo appears to be listening. I am personally absolutely thrilled by the performance and stability improvements I am seeing from the alpha. The firmware space has a solution, the device connections problem as well though it requires some settings change from the absurd default recommendations. I actually am so thrilled that I am even starting to consider moving some of my scenes back on the vera. Though testing requires some more time to confirm, the vera plus suddenly is a viable solution again. Kudos to @edward who is present and responsive on the forum.
As for the Chamberlain story, if you saw my post in that thread… In my mind any devices of this sort relying on the cloud for control is a patch/hack to integrate and is not a viable long term. I replaced all of my devices of the sort (wifi + cloud) and by reselling and buying their zwave or zigbee equivalent… actually made a significant amount of money while improving reliability and security.
If there’s hope for the Plus as a legit replacement for me, then I’m willing to consider it.
Can you elaborate on how you addressed the Chamberlain issue specifically? The opener I have has everything built in - no add-on device to enable the MyQ. And with the way that the controller is supposedly tied in to the main board, you can’t use the general momentary switch type devices any more.
Interesting. Chamberlain must have sold you a fully integrated MyQ. Mine was an external module and still had momentary switches. I would be surprised if there was no possibility to install a wired switch and wire in one of the zwave GDO to it though but you are right, you probably cannot take the myQ module out if it is integrated.
For openers that are directly WiFi enabled, the MyQ controller is integrated right into the head unit. Mine is a WD1000WF. The WD denotes Whisper Drive and the WF denotes WiFi built in. It’s the WF indicator that signals having WiFi built directly in (and therefore being directly MyQ enabled).
For openers that do NOT have the WiFi directly enabled, the add-on MyQ device has both a network connection (wired ethernet) and a remote transmitter function (just like the ones included with the opener). This is why you “add” the MyQ device as a remote to the opener. Once triggered by a network function, it transmits the operating signal to either open or close the door. Additionally, it has circuitry and logic in it know whether the door is open or closed.
For those openers that are WiFi enabled with MyQ directly integrated, the add-on MyQ device is still an option. In the event that WiFi coverage in the garage is poor, for example, a wired connection for the “stick” could still be viable.
Z-Wave GDO devices (I have one and it was super unreliable) don’t work with the new openers because the wired wall switches now have much more logic in them and do not operate purley on a momentary contact basis to control the motor. The wall plates monitor temperatures, offer “lock” settings to disable remotes, can trigger the light to stay on, have motion sensors in them to turn the lights on when motion is detected, etc. And this all rides over the same two wire connection that has been there since the beginning.
I have a Chamberlain MyQ door opener, a Honeywell thermostat, Leviton and GE/Jasco wall switches, a Dakota IR sensor wired to a smart relay (forget the brand), Aeotec smart plugs and sensors.
Everything I want to do, except the MyQ piece, is fully supported on the VeraLite. I have no Bluetooth or Zigbee devices and no plans to add any. The Edge or Plus would solve the MyQ issue (or eZLO could help me to troubleshoot why that plugin keeps falling on its face on the Lite only and I’d be happy to work on trying to update it).
I have a lot of devices that have gone into a “not responding” state and that’s a problem… my thermostat will work fine for years and then go not responding and then start working again - no hint of why, and it’s 8’ from the controller on the other side of a wall.
Not sure how much that might answer the question you asked in terms of providing useful info.
Mine have become very reliable… again over time. The fact that they are secure class device and the use of their own remote sensors (I am talking about the GoControl/Iris/Linear one) and a fairly high hardware failure rate indeed was problematic. For two doors, I have actually had 4 of these devices (replacing 2) and noticed they had different firmware versions and went from zwave to zwave plus. But… I bought them relatively cheap and used and are now rock solid but then again I have some much more ancient door openers so I can’t comment on these newer ones with a lot more functions integrated. I have a zwave 4 in 1 (motion/humidity/temperature/luminoisty) sensor for that in the garage…
Mine became unusable because it would “lose track” of the door’s state and requests to open it would result in closing it or the other way around. I have a scene to close the garage door, lock the controlled door locks and turn certain lights off at a specified time at night. I was getting up in the morning to find that the garage was open all night because the Z-Wave GDO controller was “confused” and was reporting that the door was open when it was not. This -seemed- to predominantly be related to a half-baked system of sticking a magnet to the door and relying on a sensor screwed to the wall to correctly report the door status at all times. This was 100% unreliable, so it all came out and I put in a much better opener overall.
If I could get someone to help me understand exactly where the plugin is failing, and WHY, I would be happy to work on updating it as the original author has abandoned it. I don’t have the time or inclination to learn the inner working of this controller to the point where I can tear this apart to see what’s actually happening (and the logging doesn’t show enough detail to understand what the command is that it’s launching that doesn’t work). The failure of the plug in a couple of months back was supposedly due to Chamberlain requiring TLS/1.2 only. The VeraLite supports that protocol, so that is not the reason it’s failing.
Yes I had that too!!! Turned out to be a combination of battery in the sensor being low and… communication with the vera getting lost due to excessive and wasteful polling/healing. This problem went away after I disabled polling on my network a couple of years ago and replaced the battery in the sensor.
I don’t recall whether I had polling enabled or not during that phase. It was basically a brand new GDO controller with a new battery in it. No way it could have been a low-power issue (and if it was, then good riddance as I would have been replacing the battery in it constantly).
Possibly… Since network polling is enabled by default, the starting setup will be prone to this type of failures. It does require some settings change to make it work reliably and mine had been for at least a year albeit after replacing them with newer versions of themselves.
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