hello i am new to Vera and wanted to know if it was in any way compatible with zigbee? i currently own a system by iris and i dislike the fact that i have to pay $10 every month. The system can not be customized the way i want it. i wanted to see if you guys could shed a little light and help me out with the switch over to Vera hopefully i can use some of what i have like door sensors and power switches. i also wanted to know if you guys would recommend the vera light or vera3? thank you !
HI,
I’m new myself, but I can tell you that Vera out of the box doesn’t talk Zigbee. Only Z-Wave (and WiFi/Network protocol).
But two things:
Iris has two radios one for ZWave and one for Zigbee.
1 - Not all Iris devices are Zigbee. Generally the GE switches and dimmers that say “Works with Iris” are Z-Wave devices and should work with Vera just fine. I’ll be testing those over the next few days, but others here have had good results and the Lowes prices for the GE ZWave switches are very good.
2 - The Smart Outlet, Key fobs, door and motion sensors all appear to be Zigbee and will not work directly with Vera. Others like the Iris keypad, smart button, etc. also are Zigbee.
I haven’t dug too deeply into bridges yet to see if there is anything already available that can act as a bridge between Vera and the Iris Zigbee devices but quick searches have not turned anything up yet.
That said there is work that has been done (not related to Vera) reverse engineering the Iris Smart Outlet Zigbee protocol and some success with getting it to talk with an Ardunio based controller. If I cannot find a suitable Zigbee to ZWave bridge that could work with the Isis Zigbee devices I may work on creating my own and see if I can leverage some of the Iris devices with Vera. I’m especially interested in the door sensors and the Smart Outlet.
The Iris motion sensors have not been very reliable for me. I have two that do “motion detected” glitches and generate false alarms with annoying regularity and they are not subjected to direct sun or heat sources. I know how to fix that if I was building my own motion sensor or if Iris had programming capability.
In my case I have a couple of months left to be able to return the Iris stuff so if I don’t have any success getting at least the Smart Outlet working with Vera I’ll just go all ZWave and be done with it.
So in summary, if you are still within your 90 day window for returning the Iris devices you may want to consider doing that for any of the non ZWave Iris devices. Keep any of the “Works with Iris” labelled ZWave devices and test them with Vera before returning them.
Hope this helps a bit.
Burt