Vera was dead to me.... The day the automation died.

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Bye, bye miss automation, sigh, drove my Vera the tip the day the automation died.

Return of the Living Dead. The day after Vera died.

Recently, I have encountered a number of unplanned outages where Vera failed to function as designed or planned.

Consequently, a few unplanned restores resulted in the restoration of services; however, the incremental loss in confidence was progressively built up; especially with family members. Dad saying, it’ll be right would not cut it. Especially given lack of time to focus on it.

When would it fail again? Who knew, but they were becoming more frequent and thus more annoying to the family to be more specific.

Or more importantly, the Wife Approval Factor (WAF) was eroding at a very fast rate to the point words were said. I meet my wife when she was the PM on an Project (or my boss) and she has a and extremely quite demeanour, so when words are spoken, I better listen.

Being work has been a major factor recently, the WAF was or is an extremely important requirement… Happy wife, happy life! Vera was not cutting it or to be very blunt just a massive failure at this point, thus a full failure last Thursday was not a good thing.

To say Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) was not high and each day RAM statistics would not improve in the near future without some TLC which I did not have time for with work commitments and 3 young children.

So, the ultimatum was fix it or f#?.. (I know you are all swearing now) but it was “find” something different that works was stated by the WIfe… Yes the WAF was at an all time low. Or was now at zero. Whichever way, I needed action and immediately.

So, was lucky to regain some lost ground with the WAF. This was restart with a secondary unit from the ground up… No restoring stuff as is but starting from scratch and excluding and including all z-wave devices.

The outcome was an unexpected and forgotten of days long gone… Speed and responsive. The WAF improved dramatically but not fully and won’t I suspect.

There is no intent to fully return to adding additional stuff to Vera as RAM is extremely important right now especially give restoration of WAF and lack of my time to commit to anything else right now.

The response time has dramatically improved and reinforces how good Vera is as a z-wave gateway when that is what it is only used for and therefore the migration to OpenHAB is the preferred option and is now up running but time to commit is now essential but not available. The other thing that was stated was it never happened on your old system in which she was referring to Homeseer.

So the question I ponder is what is the life expectancy of a Vera given the one time write limit? I see recently a number of others have also been indicating their Vera have experienced similar issues. I will do a scrub and see it recovers thereafter as a backup unit…

The second question is will the Vera Plus or next generation hit the market this year and what will it deliver?

Conclusion, it is all about managing relationships and stakeholders… The wife likes it when it works, the relationship between her and the investment in HA is very strained and the other stakeholders (the kids) just laugh the whole thing off. At the end it wasn’t a big drama but an annoying thing that happens which now makes it harder to justify future investments…

Don’t take life too seriously, you’ll never make it through alive!

2

For different reasons I’m now reconsidering my direction as well. My very trusty and reliable VeraLite died due in a UI7 firmware update (sound familiar) and so I just decided to upgrade, or so I thought it would be, to the the VeraEdge. I had no issues with the VeraLite in setup and use but this new Edge is a complete erratic disappointment!

Nothing seems to work right or as it states right from the setup. I should not have to be working this hard at it and the UI is so slow and clumsy. Why is this stuff so clumsy to operate…oh well back to configuring :frowning:

Jerry

3

LOL - WAF!!! My wife has a 2 second approval system. If you click the button and it doesn’t work in 2 seconds you have lost WAF. WAF is also integral to fund approval.

If WAF <0 funding approved.
If WAF =0 funding not approved.
If WAF >1 funding not approved.

Very simple. So all the things that don’t work are cleverly hidden and she has 0 access to Imperihome, MyQ, and Vera (not that she would use any of them anyways). This allows me to teeter along <=0. :-X

4

Very clever @tomtcom… Promote the Successes and hide the failures😉

My wife has the love/hate relationship with it. So, I am trying to tongue in cheek, keep an amicable relationship with her and the system. I suppose as she said, some husband gamble and drink their time away, but you just do with this home automation “stuff” so it could be a lot worse. Time for a beer now and what race is on. Bugger the HA failed again. Jokes :beer: cheers

5

My WAF is okay, but I really feel like it should be better.

Or how about “guest” proofing the automation? The same people who can’t figure out how to turn up the TV volume on my Harmony remote. Hint, it is the Vol + key. ::slight_smile:

6

My status (on half deployed system… family going with the tinkering/experimental flow):

  • WAF = same… approx 0. occasionally annoyed, but still enjoying the benefits, and promise of what this thing is to become :wink:
  • KAF (k = kid) = same… its all fun seeing what dads HA system can surprise us with today…
  • GAF (g = guest) = Arrkk! I shudder to think! Significant home extension / re-jigging due to finish in about 1 month, after which the guest driven PFGW (Pandoras floodgate of worms) will well and truly open :wink:

We need a Vera plugin to log the values of these parameters!
Stu.

PS. I second the “atleast he’s not out boozing” thing… this can be exploited as a WAF enhancement mechanism!

7

Hi Brientim

I share your need to achieve the WAF (in sooo many areas !!?) and for all of us on this forum who are married or in a relationship ‘Vera’ is the other woman/partner :wink:

For me I’ve resigned myself to the fact that you should never overload your Vera (much like the wife) if i try to make it do too much, add too many plugins Vera seems to become more unstable.

So I would say my Vera3 is set at most at 50-60% capacity, and even then it still has an almost daily (or 2) restart due to memory leakage.

So for me, it’s key not doing to much to help maintain and preserve the WAF - and as mine is primarily set up with z-wave devices (nodes) - they seem to be the least complex, compared to some of the apps - which while some sound great, they don’t always seem to be the most efficient (memory wise etc).

Overall, as part of the HOme Automation SLA we provide to our family - If I did not maintain at least a 98% success - specifically when the wife tried to do what see needed (thankfully that is largely lights and heating node based) Vera would be in the rubbish bin and I would be on the sofa :frowning:

8

Hi parkerc,

You had me thinking… I have just finished writing a new SLA and KPI with non-compliance clauses and penalties which was finalised last week.

I am glad that never applied to my Home Automation projects and support because I would owing big time.

& as @sTuDeimus alluded to the KAF, I risk failing in this area as they now think anything new is boring or dad is being funny.

Now to the GAF, we have planned to have someone mind the house very soon for a weekend and my wife’s sense of humour prevailed. As all switches operate normally, she said do not tell them anything and do the random night turn on/off with some abnormal noises and sound generating from one of the Sonos around the house. Of course her logic was, it must not be for one that they can identify the source of the noise. Now, would that achieve the GAF? Maybe not!

9

My wife has learned to somewhat rely on Vera while tolerating my tinkering. My veralite isn’t heavily loaded and runs on UI6 and has been very reliable once I worked out all of the kinks. Her favorite features…? The way the garage door opening triggers appropriate lighting outside and inside only at night, then turns off automatically based on motion sensing. Another of her favorites is asking ME to adjust HER lighting level real time when I’m out of town and Skyping with her.

Based on all the negative chatter about upgrading hardware or software I think I’ll stick with what works for now until the tide turns and a more reliable product materializes. :wink:

10

@tccmn, the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” maybe an appropriate analogy… But, a tinker is just the opposite. It ain’t broke but I can improve it" which can lead to it being broke sometimes.

UI7 has really come a long way and you need to pay a lot of attention to the type and version of devices that maybe affected if or when you upgrade. Noting UI7 is the core of MCV WRT Vera and there is no focus on previous UI.

It is quite funny, still have to adjust the lights even when you’re out of town.

11

Amen to that, and it’s like you’re a moth to a flame, …

Just one more tweak, what could possibly go wrong :slight_smile: