I am in need of controlling about 8 relays with Vera. The relays will be controlling low voltage signals, so high voltage high amp relays is not of interest.
Any suggestions on price worthy products AND not to mention, products that are compatible with Vera? There are several USB controlled relay boards out there, also some RS232 controlled and a couple LAN/WLAN controlled.
All of these would work for me, as I have wiring in place, hence zwave control is not required. It is required though that Vera can manage the relays, so that they can be included in Vera managed scenes etc.
True that should work. However so far I have been unable to get anything over RS232 to work with Vera. My adapter could not be detected the last time I worked on it. This is why I would prefer a USB solution so I can postpone digging into the hardware issues related to serial to USB converters that Vera seems to have random support for.
Still I am interested in any relay hardware that could be recommended - preferably USB, but serial too. There must be some of both I would imagine
I think any USB card that could possibly be supported would, in fact, be a serial card with built-in FTDI interface.
Anyways, it would be more expensive to discover that the entire card isn’t supported then just an adapter
Ooups, now I understand the notation in the table. I thought that the BAFO simply worked - well I hope I’ll get 3 from the right sku, and then in the future I will properly buy the ones MCV is using. I am still sad that my existing 8 port serial is not working
However I have invested so much time in trying to make it work, that I’d rather buy new known-to-be-working adapters.
I’d also use a RS-232 device for doing what you want here. Once devices go USB they seem to also become harder to integrate as they move away from being a pure-Character-serial device. My UPS, for example, does this and so can’t be integrated.
Poking around on the Web, there were a number of RS-232 Relay interface boards with simple API interfaces to them (for example the http://www.ontrak.net/adr2200.htm and it’s API). It wouldn’t be a great jump to take the I_GC100.xml file and convert it to work with something like this, since the GC100’s have similar Contact-devices (just not as many as you’d want).
Separately I’d still like to get your 8-port Serial device working. I think you were nearly there when you were doing this before on the main/sticky serial thread with @CJ. If you’d rather not waste more of your time on it, and you’re still in the BayArea/SF (per Profile), then I don’t mind picking it up and championing that for you.
