This could prove to be a contentious post, but still wanted to float the idea…
By way of background, I have been running my HA at my vacation place based on a VeraLite since 18 months, seconded for now a while by openLuup running on a Raspberry Pi… I really like that setup that is proving much more stable than the VeraLite alone ;D
I recently decided to build from scratch a new HA system for my main home, but I am growing concerned about MCV Vera’s future as a going concern (a lot of threads on this forum hint at a company in turmoil, falling behind in product development and very poorly communicating with its customers).
I therefore decided to test Domoticz running on a Raspberry Pi and a Aotec Zwave Stick Gen5. After a few days of testing, I am very impressed with Domoticz, but I find its logic/scripting to be rather complex and not as intuitive as Luup. An ideal system to me would be openLuup driving a Zwave stick through the OpenZwave API, with AltUI as GUI !
I know that @Akooer made clear a while ago that openLuup has been designed to keep a physical Vera as the “radio” for the platform, but may be this could be revisited with the help of volunteers from the community (I wish I could develop this, but this is way beyond my skills) ?
I have started to work on a Razberry device driver for openluup running on a PI card + a razberry card http://razberry.z-wave.me/
for now it loads & authenticates with the zway api and enumerate devices
but it is work in progress for now
@amg0, Thanks for the heads up… i should have expected no less from you !
I am sure you will quickly get something fully functional… Just too bad for me I settled too quickly for the Aeon Zwave Stick (I liked the fact that it can be carried around off line for inclusion) rather than the ZWay / Razberry card solution. But may be your driver can ultimately support the stick at some point (not sure Zway can support it out of the box though)
Certainly very interested in following your progress if you decide to share this with the openLuup community ?
The ZWave.me USB stick is software compatible with the Razberry board and is, of course, transferable to any hardware platform. The ZWay API is, IMHO, rather more user- friendly than the Aotec one.
looks like I may have to dust off my RaZberry, this really was always going to be the perfect system.
Looks like everything is good in the world after all, it just takes time.
For the last couple of months I had put my home automation aspirations a bit on hold. I just didn’t have the time anymore and was also getting frustrated with the lack of improvements from Vera. Yesterday I got home from a week’s vacaction only to find out that Vera had decided to let my porch light running for the whole week. This light was supposed to turn on only after sunrise when it would detect motion. I don"t believe anymore in the story of Home Automation allowing for cost savings )-:
However I am an early open luup adopter/enthusiast and this development makes me very happy again ::). My ideal HA setup would be based on a Raspberry PI, Zwave stick, OpenLuup and AltUI. This would make an easy to manage and rocksolid system.
Kudos to amg0 and Akbooer for their perseverence in developing their creative solutions
Thx
Away seems quite superior to Vera in their zwave support so the result is encouraging.
Note that We are using razberry daughter board connected on the gpio connector. I do not know if our development would work with a usb stick.
Raspberry + box + razberry makes a very nice controller for less than 100euros.
Then you get the power of openLuup and altUI, plus the new alternate App Store…
Have fun
I have recently bought a ZWave.me USB stick (as well as a Razberry board) to try this out on other machines. It is not such a cheap option, since it also requires the purchase of a licence key (another 50 GBP, or so.). I’ll try it out shortly on a BeagleBone Black, under Debian.
