Looking to buy a vera controller

[dbemowsk]

So I am thinking of getting a vera controller. I am currently running an orange pi with Domoticz, but there are limitations. In looking at the vera controllers it looks like they have a lot of support and flexibility. Can anyone give pros and cons to the different versions of the controller (vera lite, vera edge and vera plus) as far as MySensors is concerned? I see the differences listed on the vera website, but since I am moving a good amount of my stuff to MySensors, I am just wondering if there is much of a difference from that side of things.

[blacey]

@dbemowsk Personally, I would recommend the Plus. It is the fastest, has the latest z-wave plus chip and supports bluetooth and zigbee. It also has the most RAM which is good for handling a large number of devices. I wouldn't drop down below the Edge and going with the Edge means a slower controller, no bluetooth or zigbee and less RAM for devices/plugins. I have deployed vera 3s, vera edges and the 3 Vera Plus' - the Plus is by far their best and I really recommend it.

[korttoma]

I agree with @blacey. If you are going to get a Vera device, get the Plus.
I started with a Veralite myself worked great until I had added to much stuff to it then it went to shit. I had to clean out everything I could live without to make it stable again. So when it comes to Vera the limitation is memory like also @blacey mentioned so don't go crazy installing all available plugins!
I got the Plus earlier this year and so far it has been great.
Now using the old Veralite as a test unit to test things on before I take them in to use in the "production" system on the Plus.

[dbemowsk]

@korttoma, How many plugins did you have installed on your vera lite? Not that I would get that one, but I am just curious about how many you were able to put on it just for a worst case scenario argument.

[korttoma]

I don't think there is any point in putting a number on how many plugins you can have because some plugins are really small compared to others. My point was that you should always reconsider if you really need the plugin before you install it. On the Veralite I just went crazy, installing each plugin I thought looked interesting (I know better now).

Today on my VeraPlus I have the following:

Plugins:
Netatmo, Day or Night, Virtual ON/OFF Switches, PLC, PLEG, EventWatcher, VeraAlerts, Simple Alarm, GetLog, Google Calendar 3, Surveillance Station Remote, DataMine 2, UPnP Event Proxy, Sonos Controller, MySensors, USB RFXtrx433 Plugin, OpenWeather.

Devices:
2 Mysensors Gateways connecting about 25 nodes with 2 or more child sensors total of 60 sensors/actuators
40 Z-Wave devices some have also child devices
15 RFX Devices
15 Netatmo devices

Logic:
a few scenes
4 PLEG instances with hundreds of inputs calculating 97 different conditions that are performing logic actions or sending notifications.

I am sure I have forgot something but I think I have quite allot on my VeraPlus and it does not seem to have any problems with it and I stil have plenty of memory to use.

[dbemowsk]

Wow, you have a lot of devices. So I take it that since it comes with the z-wave chip that it handles z-wave devices by default (no plugin needed)? I do not have any z-wave devices at the moment. I do however have a bit of X-10 equipment though, but I really want to start to migrate a lot of that.I am having a lot of trouble with my X-10 setup in the house lately which is why I want to change a lot of it. Another reason being that I cannot pole device status from much of it, just have basic control. I may still keep my CM15A controller for things like motion sensors since those are wireless and I don't need to pull status from those ever and I don't have to worry about power line noise.

That was going to be another question, scripting logic. What does it use for scripting/conditional logic. I am pretty much okay with any kind of scripting logic, I guess I am just wondering if it is a language that I may already be familiar with.

Thanks for your feedback Tomas. It is just the information that I wanted.

[korttoma]

I hear you. I actually had my house full of X10 devices before also but like you say they do not always perform the way you would like them to.
It took me a long time (about 2 years) to replace X10 with z-wave but since the Vera supports the USB RFXtrx433 I could integrate X10 in to Vera and then replace a few at a time. The cost would just have been to much to replace them all at once. I still have some X10 scene controller in use in Vera.

Vera supports basic scenes out of the box but no AND logic or such so for advanced conditions I use a plugin called PLEG. Here is a good document containing an introduction to PLEG. PLEG is actually a plugin you will have to pay for but the price is equal to buying the author a beer.

Vera itself also supports advanced scripting using lua code.

[dbemowsk]

@korttoma said:

Vera itself also supports advanced scripting using lua code.

I recently changed to Domoticz when I started on MySensors, so I am a bit familiar with lua scripting. I don't mind paying some for a few plugins especially if they are cheap. I am assuming that the PLEG plugin is a one time cost?

[korttoma]

@dbemowsk said:

I am assuming that the PLEG plugin is a one time cost?

Yes, it is a one time cost. There is some more information about the license here.

[r-nox]

I purchased an Edge. Now that it's been a few months I would rather have purchased the Plus.

I'm still happy to own an Edge.