I’ve had a vera 2 since those were the latest thing. I had a power outage the other day and the vera seems to have stopped working – the zwave functionality is kaput. I factory reset the vera and reset the zwave network but it still does not seem able to re-pair with anything.
I’ll pull apart my vera 2 and see if there’s an obvious problem with one of the power rails or something, but I am not hopeful. I am basically ready to give up on it.
So I am evaluating where to go next. I am considering getting a vera edge which looks to be a pretty-well drop-in replacement.
I am also thinking about getting a zwave USB stick and using openzwave on a unix server. Since the actual control logic I want to cater for is on the unix server anyway, it may be that the vera 2 was overkill all along.
I had nothing but issues with my VeraLite but once I upgraded to a Vera Edge 90% of the issues were gone. Still not perfect, it’s still painfully slow at times, and all the other minor issues you see here all the time. For me it’s an acceptable platform and I’m willing to deal with the quirks.
If money and time were not a factor I would be a Homeseer user however.
If buying a new Vera, I’d recommend going with the newer Vera Plus, rather than the Edge.
While software support is still very lacking in the Vera Plus, the presence of its additional radios(ZigBee, Bluetooth) offers promise of additional functionality that the Edge can never provide.
Both the Edge and the Plus run UI7 which, good or bad, is a world apart from UI4 which you were probably running on your Vera 2.
Thanks guys. I do not believe there is a vera plus in my future – if I wanted the other radios, they’d be on a $20 raspberry pie or hooked to my existing UNIX server where my X10 stuff is controlled from.
My experience with zwave has been middling at best and I am leaning towards chucking it all out. I don’t feel the urge to figure out some new technology like insteon at the moment though, so inertia has me on a path to carry on with the zwave.
The vera features I used were super basic – I had some luua scripts to invoke events on my unix server via wget() and I invoked a few device on/off services on the vera via curl from my server. I feel that I could do that well enough with OZW, if I had the inclination to suss it out.
Very happy with my Vera Plus :D. Stable device and the Zwave plus protocol is doing what it promises. Easy inclusion even from quite a distance to the controller. Had to include a Fibaro double relay switch which was about 8 meters distance to controller on another floor, no problem 1st time right.
@gardner Given that you are keeping your control logic on a Unix box, and you are only interested in a Z-Wave controller, I think the Vera Edge might be a good choice for you. I am doing something similar with a Vera Lite.
The advantage that I see with the Vera Edge versus the Z-Wave stick is that a lot of the work is already done for you. I have found the USB sticks to be more challenging to get them to do what I want that is not where I want to spend my time. For example, consider OpenZwave Control Panel, vs a simple GUI. But then again, it is all what you prefer.
Finally, if you do go with the Edge, I would recommend buying it through Amazon and keeping all of the packaging. I have found Amazon to be far easier with returns when I am dissatisfied than Vera is.
Mainly, but but not entirely. I found it extraordinarily difficult to get things working initially, when I bought a zwave starter kit. Some of that was PEBKAC, but part was some DOA modules too. Since getting things working, I have had two other modules crap out on me. Meanwhile I have X10 gear that has been running for 25 years and is still as (marginally) reliable as the day it went in. And it cost 1/5 the money.
Mainly, but but not entirely. I found it extraordinarily difficult to get things working initially, when I bought a zwave starter kit. Some of that was PEBKAC, but part was some DOA modules too. Since getting things working, I have had two other modules crap out on me. Meanwhile I have X10 gear that has been running for 25 years and is still as (marginally) reliable as the day it went in. And it cost 1/5 the money.[/quote]
I’m not sure what answer your looking for then. Your title is asking about the vera edge, but you seem to not want z-wave and would like to stick with X10. You also seem to have more problems with the z-wave devices. I don’t know what those devices (brand or type) or if they are common to fail, but I have only had one GE z-wave switches loose their LED light on them. I have never had any z-wave device fail or quit working but I’m sure it has happened. Maybe some research on the brand or type of device would show if you got lucky, broke it from abuse or if that device is just know to have problems and fail.
Also z-wave and your experience with it can be greatly effected by the controller you use. Including,excluding,routing,device setup, firmware upgrading and many more are determined by the controller or z-wave chip in the controller you choose. Z-wave devices for me had alot of problems with recent ui7 updates and sent some of my devices into a not responding state, not based on anything with z-wave and the device but the controller and what firmware it was using. Running ui5 on the vera 2 I’m sure you didn’t see any of that yet. But also running non z-wave plus you are also missing some features and upgrade that z-wave itself has to offer.
So my point is if you don’t like z-wave or wish to use X10 then your probley asking the wrong group or in the wrong place for that. Your title and your whole first post is probley a bit different or unrelated where your going now. If you feel like Z-wave has issues do some more research and maybe test some different Z-wave products or controllers to make sure your bad experience isn’t related to only one brand of device or controller.
Also to add, I don’t have any experience with X-10 myself as I felt it was out dated years ago before I even got into home automation or even owned my house. But here’s a google search that I came up with comparing the two. I’m biased but I didn’t see anything that stood out like we should drop z-wave and go to x-10 nor any articles on that such topic.
So I have my shiny new vera edge today and I am starting to get back in business.
One thing I like about the edge compared to the vera 2 is that it seems to do full power inclusion/exclusion. This was one of the main headaches I had with the V2 since I had a bunch of kit that simply would not reliably include/exclude at low power and I really pulled my hair out back in the day. I suppose this is a new zwave-plus thing.
There are many niggles however.
My vera edge is attached to a local network over which it will never see The Internet. This fact seems to really make the U.I a bit hit or miss. It seems constantly to want me to redirect my browser to mios.com and it’s a struggle to keep things going. It seems lime most U.I settings are stuck in some mode pending a mios account that will never exist.
The old Vera2 had useful settings to, for example, control its NTP source which I can’t find in the new OS.
I will noodle around for threads regarding running this box without an internet connection. If anyone has suggestions, I would be grateful for pointers. Thx.
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