Vitrum association quest

Other Devices & Integrations Lighting & Load Control
1

Hi,

In a task to automate a home full of Vitrums I’ve stumble on very strange behavior, especially regarding associations. Vitrum Satelite light switches are multichannel devices, not controlling any power circuit, but only sending (via Z-Wave) commands to other devices. So I needed to associate several of these with real commutators (some of them - Fibaro Dimmer or Fibaro Relay switches), so during building association network I’ve stumbled on three major problems:

  1. For some reason Vera doesn’t receive status updates when something happens on the Vitrum switch. Even if it is explicitly added to this buttons’ group.
  2. I can’t really delete associations. Once something is added to the list it stay there - deleting it from Vera (using both group editor, or AssociationSet variable) - doesn’t change the behavior.
  3. Connecting more than one remote button to real one seem to flood the Z-network. For example I have one Dimmer, which must be controlled from 4 different buttons. In order to keep the status light in-sync I need to have 4 associations on EVERY of the 4 buttons.

I’ve asked Vitrum for some technical help and received partial answers to (1) and (2). It looks that Vitrum is using only MULTICHANNEL associations. So, for question (1) - an end-point number for the Vera itself need to be provided. Which one? Unfortunately my Vera right now is blocked and I can’t test with ‘1’, but that would be guessing, anyways.

For (2) this answer means, that Vera is not sending proper “clear multichannel association” command. At least - this is how it seems to me. Is it true?

For (3) - is there certain recommended number of associations that should be obeyed?

Thanks!

2

Hello… any ideas? Except the obvious one - don’t EVER use Vitrum Z-Wave switches… :frowning:

I’ve tested referring my Vera with “2.1” in association list (i.e. adding an end-point number to it’s ID) - no success. There are several threads on this with no resolution:

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,9856.msg66344.html#msg66344

and

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,7990.msg51235.html#msg51235

Can someone form MiCasaVerde give us some enilghtment on how to deal with that?

3

Hi there,
I am from Vitrum. The problem is that, as you have said in your post, the Vera is single channel and our Vitrum devices are multi channel, which means that the Vera only ever sees the status of the first button. There was talk of the Vera supporting multi channel but I don’t know when this is going to happen.

There was a similar problem when a company was trying to write a driver between the Vera, Vitrum and Control4. It didn’t work satisfactorily. In the end we had our own driver written, using our Home Master Router for integration with Control4 and Crestron.

Finally we would be delighted if it could be sorted out for the Vera to work with our Vitrum devices!

4

Thank you, Ivanlewis, for you reply.

While I agree lots of things are pretty messed up in Vera, I should admit that it supports multichannel devices a bit MORE than Fibaro Home Center, for example. Using Vera I had not problem associating anything to point TO sub-node of Vitrum. Although I do have problems properly clearing such association, so if I need to change something I need to reset the Vitrum unit and start all over again…

But the Vitrum problem is that (obviously) it supports ONLY multichannel command set, which is not sufficient to communicate (i.e. update status) on Vera.