Yes, a little tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, has anyone had an issue with Vera misreading the USB port location of the PLM? I have had a devil of a time getting my Vera2 to play nicely with Insteon (Alsteon plugin or native support) but its finally working- mostly.
After repeatedly resetting Vera back to factory, wiping all settings etc., I “did” get altsteon up and running smoothly. No idea what caused the problem with previous iterations but 07 is working fine.
However- whenever Vera reboots, and sometimes even when she doesn’t- Vera switches the assigned USB port for the PLM which causes my zwave (currently running off an Aeon Labs Ver.2 usb key), to fail. The only solution I’ve found is unplugging the PLM, then rebooting Vera and plugging the PLM back in once Vera has finished startup.
Sometimes a few times in a row b/c the USB port swap happens again.
Any suggestions on how to solve this problem? I have many more zwave devices and implemented scenes than Insteon- so its a problem to loose zwave whenever there is a glitch with the PLM’s usb port.
Was this a leveraged buy out? Or were swords and pitchforks involved? ;D
I have had this happen to me as well on a Vera 3. From what I can tell, once in a while the drivers will enumerate the available serial ports in a different order. (It has only happened to me on boot.) When this happens, Altsteon will try to grab on to whatever serial port it was set to grab and try to use it. If it grabs the wrong one, then it may be sending byte codes to your Z-wave dongle that will confuse it. Or worse, it may cause just enough interference to make the Z-wave dongle view every command as an error. If serial ports are changing names without a reboot, then something REALLY funky is going on. If you had a short in the cable you might see the port drop and come back as a higher port number, but you should never see a port take the name of another port without a reboot. If it happens again, you might SSH in to the Vera and run “dmesg” and look for the reason that the port was renamed.
Unfortunately, neither Altsteon nor the PLM have any control over what order the devices are enumerated in. I suspect this is partially why in the Vera code they use different names for the serial ports that seem to be based more on the chipset characteristics.
The correct way to handle this is to get TCP support implemented in Altsteon, and then let the Vera software tell us where the PLM is. That support is partially there, but I hit some snags along the way that made me drop it to work on something else. (Can’t remember what the snags were. That was about a year ago.)
So, I suspect at some point this will be resolved as it will make Altsteon play nicer with the Vera as a whole. But right now, it is just an unfortunate situation. However, if you are a Unix wiz, you could probably hack up a fancy shell script to start Altsteon that would look at the device tables and tell Altsteon the correct port to use.
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