My first foray into HA was with Smart things which I chose primarily because of cost. It works but is limited in so many way I did not realize before purchase. I then started looking at stand alone software and those that have the features come at an exorbitant cost (home SEER). Vera appears to be the good middle ground and with the Vera lite available at Amazon right now for 100 bucks it seems like a no brainer. That said I have some concerns.
Vera lite seems to be a discontinued product in the US. shop.getvera.com doesn’t list it any longer for North America and is pushing the edge. The edge is 149 and has wifi which I do not need. I don’t want to spend 50 bucks for a feature I do not want nor will I ever need but I’m also concerned about support for a discontinued device.
In all my research it seems as though all the complaints I have about Smart things and their limited control of devices is not an issue in Vera. It seems pretty easy and intuitive to set up all the triggers, scenes, and schedules I want as well as I have access to the advanced controls of my devices if I want/need it. There is however one thing that drives me nuts. I have a door contact set to turn on the lights in a hallway, at 20%, and the lights in my garage when the door opened during certain hours. The hall lights shut off after 15 minutes however they are triggered and the garage lights shut off after an hour same way. Now here is the frustration. If I manually turn the hall lights on at 100% and open the door they dim to 20% as per the control but if I turn the lights on manually and then open the door 5 minutes before the off timer shuts them off the timer will not be reset. Setting a trigger to turn the lights off after X minutes when the door closes does not fix the issue. If seems as though Luup might be able to be used for this but I’m no dummy but also not a programmer.
This is about the most complicated thing I need to do, reset a timer after an action has taken place. How doable is that and what device should I buy?
Home automation is not cheap! If you do it even moderately well, you will spend thousands of dollars. Making your controller purchase decision based on price, especially so little as $50, is folly. The cost of the controller, even at $1,000, is inconsequential compared to the system overall.
The Vera Lite’s future support is certain to end. Vera Edge is the replacement product and,while it has lots of issues, I would be loath to recommend a newcomer to buy a discontinued product in favor of it. But, at only ~$150 it should not be such a big deal to buy a new controller in a year or whenever.
Your described lighting scenario is possible using Lua code and or the PLEG plugin. But it will not be really simple/easy. You’ll need to write some code, or at least think like a coder with PLEG.
One way might be to set a variable to identify the difference between a manual turn On and a scene based turn On, then testing for the variable. Another method might be to have the garage scene test if the light was already On, before dimming and timed shut off. There are likely other ways to do it, but this is the first that comes to my mind.
I’d say to search the forums and see if the devices you already have, suffer any insurmountable issues on the Vera Edge. If not, buy the Edge and dive in. Metaphorically; the water is cold, but you get use to it after a bit.
[quote=“brian.peters, post:1, topic:185080”]My first foray into HA was with Smart things which I chose primarily because of cost. It works but is limited in so many way I did not realize before purchase. I then started looking at stand alone software and those that have the features come at an exorbitant cost (home SEER). Vera appears to be the good middle ground and with the Vera lite available at Amazon right now for 100 bucks it seems like a no brainer. That said I have some concerns.
Vera lite seems to be a discontinued product in the US. shop.getvera.com doesn’t list it any longer for North America and is pushing the edge. The edge is 149 and has wifi which I do not need. I don’t want to spend 50 bucks for a feature I do not want nor will I ever need but I’m also concerned about support for a discontinued device.
In all my research it seems as though all the complaints I have about Smart things and their limited control of devices is not an issue in Vera. It seems pretty easy and intuitive to set up all the triggers, scenes, and schedules I want as well as I have access to the advanced controls of my devices if I want/need it. There is however one thing that drives me nuts. I have a door contact set to turn on the lights in a hallway, at 20%, and the lights in my garage when the door opened during certain hours. The hall lights shut off after 15 minutes however they are triggered and the garage lights shut off after an hour same way. Now here is the frustration. If I manually turn the hall lights on at 100% and open the door they dim to 20% as per the control but if I turn the lights on manually and then open the door 5 minutes before the off timer shuts them off the timer will not be reset. Setting a trigger to turn the lights off after X minutes when the door closes does not fix the issue. If seems as though Luup might be able to be used for this but I’m no dummy but also not a programmer.
This is about the most complicated thing I need to do, reset a timer after an action has taken place. How doable is that and what device should I buy?[/quote]
You need to do alot more research to know what your getting yourself into.
First your request’s are not doable right out of the box and with the factory VERA software. Your scenes will need to be in Luup (which I haven’t learned or with use of a 5.00 plugin called “PLEG”. You’ll find alot of plugin’s (most for free) that will complete your tasks where the factory UI left off. And people complain that Vera should have incorporated them from the start. But anyhow it can be done but not by a first grader.
The hardware on the VERA’s is underpowered and runs out of RAM after you start installing plugins and devices. Buying a veralite will cut your RAM in half vs. the edge and cpu is a little slower and no new Z-wave PLUS chip. But the Lite runs the older more stable software and with this I would say is more complete. The new edge only runs the new ui7 software which has some issues, not all plugins are compatible with it yet (so what was once working is now broken in some cases). I the long term we will all be on ui7 but for now the ones that don’t need any features from ui7 we stay on ui5 to keep everything stable.
So right now a Lite will work best, but as you grow your gonna be in my boat (just bought a EDGE to replace my lite). Also I bought my EDGE for 133.96 preorder on Amazon when they had a deal on it. So the price is not much different. I also paid like 179 for my Lite back when it wasn’t even brand new in 2013. So prices have went down on the controllers.
Save yourself the headaches. Vera Edge is currently junk. Main functionality barely works and gets frustrating at times. Documentation & support are non-existent. About the only thing I could get to work was a developer plug-in for my alarm system, but since I couldn’t get anything else to work, I’m not even 100% sure that completely worked. If you’re coming from SmartThings, you’re going to be disappointed in the quality.
There are other options out there currently (at different ends of the price spectrum) to be tried, and I expect within 1-2 years they’ll actually be some good options.
If you want to get into the Vera pond so to speak, I’d suggest to get a Vera 3. It’s a nice middle ground and allows you to run either UI5 or Ui7.
It has more memory than a VeraLite and that seems to contribute to it running more stable than a VeraLite as I’ve seen many complain about instability with 100%+ memoryu usage.
Based on CES2015 previews, GetVera is supposed to announce the VeraEdge Plus which is supposed to have support for more than Z-Wave.
As the VeraEdge is basically the successor to the VeraLite, I believe that Plus model is positioned to be the successor to the Vera 3.
The Vera 3 a few months back was available on Amazon for a little as $100 (That’s when I snagged my secondary unit) but prices seem higher now.
I agree with this 100% View HA as a considerable investment. If it isn’t now, it very well could be in the future. Once things are working the way that you want them to work, ideas pop into your head to do other things with it, and it snowballs into something much bigger than it was initially. When you find yourself with 30+ devices, countless apps and thousands invested, $50 means nothing.
My opinion of the investment factor for my build is more based on time than it is on dollars spent. I couldn’t begin to try and quantify the amount of hours I have invested in planning, product research, scene creation and programming, and installation. If I had to pay someone for this, I would be broke. It’s all part of the allure of Vera. I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience and it is a large part of the reason I chose it. IMO, this is the majority of the investment.
[quote=“BOFH, post:6, topic:185080”]If you want to get into the Vera pond so to speak, I’d suggest to get a Vera 3. It’s a nice middle ground and allows you to run either UI5 or Ui7.
It has more memory than a VeraLite and that seems to contribute to it running more stable than a VeraLite as I’ve seen many complain about instability with 100%+ memoryu usage.[/quote]
Excellent advice. I went this route myself after realizing that my n-th revision of my build would possibly tax the Lite’s resources, so I stepped it up.
The ability to run either UI5 or UI7 is also a big deal. I have yet to try UI7 as UI5 is working perfect for me, but there will come a time where I will have to bite the bullet and move forward. I have the ability to do that with this unit.
Yeah I understand the point about 50 bucks being not a big deal in the scheme of things but I’ve already made a 150 mistake with the smart things hub and the Aeon Labs dongle. I didn’t feel like pouring more money down the drain as I could have 3 more dimmers for what I wasted here. Consequently I was looking for some solid advise to not waste any more money or time on a controller.
My current system consist of a 3 way dimmer, 3 way switch, two single switches, two crappy multi sensors hat are only being used for temperature monitoring, two plug modules and two door contacts. On the horizon are a couple more dimmer/switches, a couple more appliance modules and a could more door switches. This system was not going to be huge and was not include security or thermostats. The point about what I thought I would do and what I realize I can do after having the system are divergent ideas and it’s probably better to go bigger than I think I need.
If money were no object I probably do a Home SEER or similar system but where a 50 dollar switch can be added easily over time a $800 dollar controller is much harder purchase to justify.
Thanks for the advise.
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