Preview of Multi-System Reactor

Here’s a very informal first-look/preview of Multi-System Reactor that I just put together. Progress is excellent, I think, and I’m very happy with performance so far. There’s still much to do, particularly on the documentation side, but what a fun project…

YouTube: A preview of Multi-System Reactor (MSR) -- first look - YouTube

Rumble: Preview of Multi-System Reactor -- first look

Chat with me on Discord: Discord

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Great Work Patrick ! Cant wait to try with Hubitat and old Vera Plus

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How is it running… Cloud or some kind of local?

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All local!

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Well done! :muscle:

Local on Vera or and Hubitat for example?

Wow!! I had a look at your Rumble video and this is really very impresive Patrick. :+1:. This is smart 2.0! Combining your Dashboard and the Reactor indeed offers a good solution to become less dependent on one single home controller hub (allthough if a hub satisfies all the needs it is also okay).

Patrick - you truely are the Einstein and the wizard of home automation. :crown::+1: I have only just begun the Home Assistent journey, combined with my Veras. In HA I’ve only added devices so far. The main reason I haven’t started with automations within the HA, is because I have missed the Reactor and the learning curve is long. All my active automations are being handled by reactor right now. But that means I can’t use the full potential and all the entitys in HA. This MSR is a total game changer! I haven’t donated anything before, but now I’m so greatfull for your work, :clap: so I think it’s time!
Thank you and have a great year!! Over and out,
/Fanan

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Interesting. Does it run on Vera or also on other platforms? Dashboard runs in browser?

Hey Patrick, FYI, I have been working on a HomeKit bridge for Ezlo where I too abstracted out the concept of individual hubs and perhaps some of it may be of interest or even direct use to Multi-System Reactor. In particular, I have implemented an interface to Ezlo hubs that discovers and proxies ezlo hubs over secure websockets. The API will discover all ezlo hubs on the local network and establish a “local” connection to each, using either “live-credentials” from the MIOS portal, or static credentials in a local configuration file, and provides an API used by my homebridge-ezlo plugin to expose ezlo devices as HomeKit accessories. As a result, it too is extremely responsive and fast - accessory changes are instantaneous.

If you look at the diagram below, the “Ezlo API” side of the diagram could also be used to power an Ezlo Controller for MultiSystem Reactor. For my purposes, I needed something that could run in a homebridge nodejs instance so I wrote it in typescript because I haven’t implemented much javascript in the past and felt that the type-safety would help. My plan is to publish it all to GitHub when it is ready but I need a bit more time on the Homebridge side of the equation.

There is also Rene’s ezlo-bridge that might be an easier fit but I thought I would toss it out anyway.

What language are you using for the ReactorMS Controllers and ReactorMS back-end? Any thoughts/interest?

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It runs under pretty much any of the major Linux distributions at the moment. I will be looking to have it run under Windows and MacOS as well. My goal is to have docker containers for the most common NAS systems as well. It should run on a Raspberry Pi.

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I’m also under nodejs. If you wanted to write the eZLO interface, I’d be happy to have you do that once I’ve gotten enough docs together to support others doing it.

Sounds good.

It might also be interesting to bridge HomeKit accessories to ReactorMS! :wink:

Do you install MSR on your Hub that it supports? In my case Hubitat C7 @rigpapa

It’s not really built to run on the controller as much as it is to run with it. My goal is make a Raspberry Pi an acceptable platform for a modest-sized system. The latest model is quite robust. A lot of HA users seem to also use home or small-office NAS systems, and most of those systems support docker containers (as does RPi), which makes an easy, trouble-free install without a lot of admin know-how. So those are my initial target user groups. The folks using Linux VMs or dedicated hardware will have it easy, as they’ll be able to choose docker or an install archive.

That said, I do have a successful build environment for the version of OpenWrt currently underpinning the Vera firmware, so it remains for me to test if I can get a version of nodejs up and running there. If that’s the case, it could be installed side-by-side with the Vera firmware. Another similar option for later consideration (at/after Vera EOL) is to build a stock-but-current OpenWrt image for the Vera hardware, so that you’d be able to extend the life of that hardware.

Of course, at the moment I have more options in front of me than time/hands, and most importantly, I’m going to let the community guide my priorities. Right now, it’s all about fit-and-finish for this first version. I can’t learn anything until somebody other than me uses it.

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Sounds fantastic…

I have also started down the HA road. I hope that reactor will end up working on the hassOS, as I went down the RPI4 road, with hassOS on an SSD drive.

But as I said, can’t wait to try this

Yeah, I’ll offer my help to support both Shelly and Tasmota, since they’re two popular options for people here. I know they’re supported by Home Assistant as well, but I’m thinking of people wanting to integrate them in a straightforward way into scenarios via Reactor. Looking at your video, it should be easy to add sensors to the equation as well. Great job!

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Well, I guess now I know where to focus my documentation efforts! :slight_smile:

I have a couple of questions if I may.

  1. Will it support Z-Wave and Zigbee devices paired to an Ezlo Plus hub at some point?

  2. If I ditched PLEG on my Vera Plus and started using Multi-System Reactor instead, say on a Raspberry Pi, for use with the devices paired to my Vera Plus, at a later date how difficult would it be to migrate to another controller hub as far as Reactor is concerned?

From a Vera Plus to Ezlo Plus or from a Vera Plus to Hubitat hub or whatever.

Presumably all the devices moved to the new controller would be seen by Reactor as new devices on a different controller than what they were originally located on.

How easy to keep all your existing Reactor rules / automations / logic / scenes? Sorry I don’t know what they are called in Reactor.

  1. Sounds like Multi-System Reactor will be for a Raspberry Pi or a system running Docker. Rather than actually being installed as a plugin on the Z-Wave controller hub itself.

What are the benefits of this? Other than enabling cross platform support for various Home Automation controllers.

Thanks.

Wow! That’s one of the things missing for me to move more devices to Ezlo. HomeKit integration. Sign me up if you need any help with beta testing when you’re there!

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