Newbie help with AD2USB / Vista20P?

Plugins & Plugin Development Unmaintained
#1

OK…

I’m sorry to start a new thread, because I THINK everything I need to know is actually already on here somewhere, but after searching for days, I can’t get this all working, and I think it’s because some of the information I’m reading isn’t current, so I’m hoping someone can give me some idea of what I’m doing wrong with my AD2USB connection to Vera…

I have a VeraLite running the most current code. I have installed my AD2USB on my Vista20P panel, and it is configured to address 18, and I can successfully use PUTTY or the PERL based virtual keypad to see/monitor, and type into the alarm system successfully, so I ASSUME I’m good up to the USB connection into the alarm…

Now, before I go into what I do next, let me say that really all I would like to do is to be able to monitor when doors / windows are open and shut, and MAYBE later, arm or disarm the alarm, but for now, I’d be very happy if I could just use the state of the doors/windows in my scenes, so I could (for example) make a scene that says when a door is opened, and it’s night time, turn on the lights, so it can turn on the lights when I open the door…

As for how I’m getting there, this is what I’m doing, which isn’t working:

I plug the USB into the Vera, and load the AD2USB module on Vera’s webpage. I have seen some talk in forums about updating the USB driver, but I see a dev/ttyUSB0 and was able to configure my serial port with that device (see capture1.jpg). I was able to go into the AD2USB module, and tell it to create device, and it says it created “Ademco Vista Alarm Panel” device.

In the “Ademco Vista Alarm Panel” device, I assign it a room, and change the name to “Alarm Panel” because it says it can’t be more than 20 characters, then under Advanced / Variables, in the “NumPartitions”, I put 1, because I saw someone mention that in a thread…

Now, under devices / Apps, I see “Alarm Panel” but it says “Ademco Vista Plugin Can’t Detect Device” and in the header of the page, it says “Ademco Vista Plugin : No keypad assigned to partition 1.”… I will reboot the vera just for good measure…

After reboot, I have an “Ademco Vista Partition 1” device, but it has an error: “Can’t Detect Device”. I go into that device, and under advanced/variabled, I set the keypadAddresses to “16,18”. (I dont think I have a keypad 17, but when I set this up originally, I thought I did… Could THIS be the problem? Do the keypads have to be sequential? I dont think so, since it worked through the keypad emulator, but I mention in the interest of full disclosure!!)

So… Now, I’m stuck… It SEEMS like it should be working, and I see where I can enter zone names under the cheatsheet thing (although what those fields to the right mean are still a question to me!!) but it seems that it SHOULD NOT be giving me the errors I’m getting at this point… (Capture2.jpg)

Can ANYONE tell me where I’m going wrong??
Thanks so much in advance!! I’m a newbie at this whole vera thing, but very excited about the possibilities!!

-Steve

1 Like
#2

“Device used by” Is there not a “Ademco Vista Alarm Panel” option in that drop down?

#3

AWESOME! (duh!)
I can’t believe I got that close, and missed that… I saw “Alarm panel” and picked it… forgetting I had another (unrelated) app called virtual alarm panel…

SO, yes, as soon as I made that change, I got rid of the error on the partition, although the alarm panel itself still shows “Can’t detect device”…

So. Looking at this, it seems that it’s ready to let me arm/disarm from the partition 1 application. I’m at work, doing this all remotely, so I dont want to arm the system accidentally and not be able to disarm it remotely, so I think THAT part of it will have to wait 'till I get home, but do you have any idea why the panel itself would still say “cant detect device”? And/or how to most easily populate my sensor zones into Vera?

(The lazy geek in me wants to believe that the “Automatically Configure” pull-down would query the alarm and populate my “cheat sheet” but that doesn’t seem to be happening…)

I assume I should be able to see / utilize the open/closed status of my doors and windows as switches in Vera? How do I configure that now?

Thanks SO much for this help… I can’t believe I was so close and missed something so dumb… :slight_smile:

-Steve

#4

[quote=“172pilot, post:3, topic:190360”]AWESOME! (duh!)
I can’t believe I got that close, and missed that… I saw “Alarm panel” and picked it… forgetting I had another (unrelated) app called virtual alarm panel…

SO, yes, as soon as I made that change, I got rid of the error on the partition, although the alarm panel itself still shows “Can’t detect device”…

So. Looking at this, it seems that it’s ready to let me arm/disarm from the partition 1 application. I’m at work, doing this all remotely, so I dont want to arm the system accidentally and not be able to disarm it remotely, so I think THAT part of it will have to wait 'till I get home, but do you have any idea why the panel itself would still say “cant detect device”? And/or how to most easily populate my sensor zones into Vera?

(The lazy geek in me wants to believe that the “Automatically Configure” pull-down would query the alarm and populate my “cheat sheet” but that doesn’t seem to be happening…)

I assume I should be able to see / utilize the open/closed status of my doors and windows as switches in Vera? How do I configure that now?

Thanks SO much for this help… I can’t believe I was so close and missed something so dumb… :slight_smile:

-Steve[/quote]

Well really I don’t have a AD2USB or a Vista Panel. I have a USB to serial adapter and a GE/Caddx panel at my house. So I don’t have all your answers or any experience with your particular setup. I’m shooting in the dark at general setup options.

I know on the Caddx panel you need to scan and it will find which zones are configured to your alarm panel, but it doesn’t know what type of sensor it is (fire, door, motion, ect.) so I had to name each and tell it if it was a motion or door before it would create the correct type of sensor in vera.

“Can’t detect device” That was a common error in UI7 at one point due to the fact it’s not a real device and vera was waiting for it to respond as if it were. Most of those issue have been fixed with a plugin update some time ago. I don’t remember seeing that as a common issue with this plugin so I’m going to say that you still have a setup error. And that might go away after you get the sensors setup.

#5

Thanks! (Again) and… yes, somehow just by waiting, the alert went away. I did find another thread (http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,7266.0.html) that did have some info about others having the same problem, and that I should reset “ConnectionDown” to 0 and “CommFailureTime” to 0, but when I went to look for those, it had already cleared. Once I did find those entries however, I see a “CheckConnectionTimer” set to 180 in there, so perhaps I didn’t wait long enough for it to reset itself? (I’d think the 180 is in seconds, and “surely” I waited 3 minutes, but perhaps not)…

I think I’m learning that nothing goes as fast as I’d think on this system, as far as updates to configs go, and I just need to take a deep breath and walk away for 10 minutes or so if something isn’t working right! :slight_smile:

Still dont have zones set, but with no errors currently showing, I have hope that at least it should work when I figure out what to do!!

If/when I figure it out, I’ll post if here, to hopefully have a complete set of steps documented for the next guy with a VeraLite on UI7 (or me if I forget again!) :slight_smile:

-Steve

#6

[quote=“172pilot, post:5, topic:190360”]Thanks! (Again) and… yes, somehow just by waiting, the alert went away. I did find another thread (http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,7266.0.html) that did have some info about others having the same problem, and that I should reset “ConnectionDown” to 0 and “CommFailureTime” to 0, but when I went to look for those, it had already cleared. Once I did find those entries however, I see a “CheckConnectionTimer” set to 180 in there, so perhaps I didn’t wait long enough for it to reset itself? (I’d think the 180 is in seconds, and “surely” I waited 3 minutes, but perhaps not)…

I think I’m learning that nothing goes as fast as I’d think on this system, as far as updates to configs go, and I just need to take a deep breath and walk away for 10 minutes or so if something isn’t working right! :slight_smile:

Still dont have zones set, but with no errors currently showing, I have hope that at least it should work when I figure out what to do!!

If/when I figure it out, I’ll post if here, to hopefully have a complete set of steps documented for the next guy with a VeraLite on UI7 (or me if I forget again!) :slight_smile:

-Steve[/quote]

Good luck.