Posts made by JoeStrout

I started setting up a Z-wave network a couple months ago when I moved into this new house. For the most part, things are working pretty well. But I have a node in the back yard that controls the yard lights; it's located in the pool pump area, behind a concrete wall, and the far edge of the property.

At first I couldn't reach that node at all, but then I stuck another module on one of the outside outlets on that side of the house. Then I was able to reach that remote node fairly reliably. But it was still a bit flaky, and for the past two days, I haven't been able to reach it at all. That means trudging out to turn the yard lights on and off by hand. WAF is low, and I'm not happy either. Moreover, we want to add Z-wave control of the pool pump as well, which would be in the same area, but that's going to require an extensive electrical refactoring — so we need to be sure it's going to actually work!

So! This is why I'm asking:

How can I best extend the range out to a remote node, when there are no outlets in between? Are there dedicated "relay" modules that have bigger antennas or more power? Or is there some sort of wired relay (the wire of which I suppose I could bury in the yard)?

(And sorry for the non-MySensors-specific question... but I've found this forum to be friendlier and more helpful on all topics than other Z-wave forums on the net!)

Over on the Vera forum, I asked about a combo keypad that could trigger a scene when the correct combination is entered. This would be handy to have outside your house, to do things like open the garage door, turn on the lights, adjust the thermostat, etc.

Surprisingly, this apparently doesn't exist. The common work-around is to use a normal combo-pad garage door opener, and then a sensor on the door itself to detect when it's been opened and do stuff. But this can't distinguish between somebody entering and somebody leaving, so it's far from ideal.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to do it once you have a MySensors setup — you could use something like this Touch Display Scene Controller, but perhaps replacing the touch display with a simple number pad. And then program it to trigger a scene when the combo is entered. You could even have several scenes that are triggered with different combos (one for family, one for guests?), or have it do something else (e.g. notify the owner) after too many failed attempts.

I don't have the time or ambition to do this at the moment; I have too many irons in the fire already... but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. It would perhaps make a great project article.

Just to follow up, I tried out the Verde UI protocol, and it works great! I was able to throw together this little demo:

...and it is quite responsive, in both directions (flipping the wall switch quickly updates the display, and tapping the on-screen button quickly switches the light).

I like Verde much better now that I've discovered its web service API. Thank you @BartE!

Thanks for the info about the Vera protocol and delayed AJAX calls. That seems evil but functional.

I'm still not entirely convinced that Vera is actually saving me much at that point; I find it extremely fiddly (when not outright buggy) to work with, and from looking over the OpenZWave API, that looks refreshingly straightforward.

But yes, @BartE, this would mean I dedicate a machine to being the ZWave (as well as thin client) server. I have several older Mac Minis lying around, as well as several more Raspberry Pis, any of which ought to be up to the job. They (plus an Aeon Zstick) would simply replace the Vera in my setup.

But I come here looking for advice, and I hear what you're saying, so I will be patient and give the Vera UI protocol an honest try. It may indeed save me a lot of time not having to write the server (and there's certainly appeal in having other controller apps available whenever mine is down for maintenance).

Since the Zstick is already on order, I will probably also play around a bit with Domoticz and OpenZWave... in a month or two I guess I'll have a good idea which is the path of least pain!

I doubt a web-based interface could be as responsive as I like; the whole basis of HTTP is that the server knows nothing of the clients, but only responds to requests. That means the clients would have to poll very frequently in order to find out if anything has changed. That's why I'm planning a more terminal-style persistent connection; when something happens, the server can then simply update all the clients immediately.

OK, thanks to you kind folks, I no longer consider myself a complete Z-wave newbie; I have a small network which has been functioning properly for days now. Now I'm ready to get serious about the long-term plan, and I'm looking for a bit more advice.

Our goal is to have an LCARS-style UI, complete with an interactive floor plan of our home, available on our phones and iPads as well as at several wall-mounted tablets around the house. These should be responsive in the sense that when somebody flips a (smart) switch, the displays update immediately. (Things like temperature and humidity can be polled less frequently.)

I don't believe such a UI is available off-the-shelf, so I'm planning to write it. I'm a software engineer by trade, so that part doesn't worry me. Each of the displays will be a thin client, told by a central server to display various images and text at various points at the screen, and which of these should be interactive, and they will call back to the server when the user taps something. (I'm glossing over details here but that gives the general idea.)

So, now we come to the question:

Should I plan on keeping some off-the-shelf controller, like Vera or Domoticz, in between my central LCARS server and the Z-wave network? Or should I just use the OpenZWave library with an Aeon Zstick to speak to the Z-wave devices directly?

I'm trying to resist reinventing the nail here as much as I can... but my intuition is that figuring out how to interface with some off-the-shelf controller, and especially to get immediate notification when something changes, is likely to be as much work as just writing my own controller software with OpenZWave. And given the huge pile of code I'm going to have to write to manage my fancy UI, the actual Z-wave part of it seems fairly minor in either case.

But there are folks here with far more experience in this stuff than me... what do you think?

Thanks,
Joe

Thanks, @Sparkman. I hadn't heard of DSC boards before, but I found this. Does indeed look promising.

And that Vera interfacing document you linked to looks pretty clear.

So, this is not a simple project... it's a pretty major retrofit, in fact. But it's doable! And knowing that is enough to keep me going.

OK, some hunting turned up the enclosure in the coat closet. This looks very promising indeed — I can see that all the sensor wires come to here. This suggests that they are indeed wired through the walls, which is fantastic (no batteries, no radio!), and far more trouble than I would have gone to!

It also means that I should be able to tap into them all in this one place, if I can figure out how to do it. Worst case, I guess I could gut the system completely, and just use the wiring to the sensors with my own electronics. Not sure how my spouse and insurance company would feel about that, though. They may prefer I keep the ability to call the alarm company and reactivate the service if we decide to do that.

And here's the control panel.

Note that I couldn't find a serial or ethernet port, or any other sort of data port, on any of this. I suspect it's a pretty old system — possibly as old as the house (mid-80s).

Thoughts? (And by the way, you guys are awesome!)

The previous owners of my house used a Protection One security system. While the service has been discontinued, the wall unit is still there, with a little LED that goes out when any window or door is open. Every window and door appears to have a magnetic reed switch, neatly installed into the frame and painted over, so they are nearly invisible.

I would very much like to get access to that sensor data for my HA system. I don't much care about monitored service, but with all the sensors so neatly installed, it'd be a colossal waste not to use them.

But I have no idea whether these sensors are wired through the walls, or some sort of wireless system. I've tried searching for the details, but my google-fu is not strong enough. Any ideas how I would go about figuring out how these sensors get power and communicate, and tapping into it (perhaps via MySensors hardware?) for my own purposes?

@Dwalt you may be right... I tested with some other Vera remote apps, and was still getting 10-20 seconds response time for my switch, so I tried rebooting the Vera unit. Now it is near-instantaneous.

So, maybe that's something I just have to do now and then. As long as it's not too frequent (and maybe only after installing new devices), I can live with that.

As I have a couple of old Mac Minis lying around feeling unloved, this is exactly the sort of setup I am now pondering.

Thanks for the encouragement!

I'm sorry, I must be dangerously close to an annoyance threshold, but I feel you're saying something really fundamental and important that I'm just not getting.

How can you have your lights both controlled by regular wall switches, and controlled by Z-wave actuators?

The only arrangement I can think of is that the wall switch cuts the power to the actuator, which kills the light but also drops it out of the Z-wave network, and in the morning, you have to use the wall switch to turn the lights back on, and then you get Z-wave control again. But this means that when a light is off, you don't know (without looking) whether to reach for the wall switch, or the Z-wave controller. Is that it, or is there a more clever arrangement I'm not thinking of?

Thanks again, I appreciate the insight.

And I realize now that I wouldn't have to write my own HA software with the Z-stick... apparently it works with OpenHAB, HomeGenie, and probably others. So that's something... and for $43, it may be worth a try!

Thanks Al, it sounds like your setup is what I want. It's great to hear that it's possible. I'll also take a look at HomeSeer. Not being tied into a particular controller is a big part of why I chose Z-Wave over some of the alternatives.

I'll also read up on z-wave+, which I know nothing about at the moment.

Thanks, that is the sort of real-world advice I'm looking for (though not what I was hoping to hear, of course).

But when it comes to simplifying our life, a big one would be turning all the lights off when we go to bed. Currently we wander the house flipping switches (which is especially frustrating in this house, where the switches are often in a different room from the lights). My wife loves the idea of a "go to bed" button that shuts off all the lights and locks all the doors.

How do you accomplish that if your lights are all hooked up to regular wall switches?

As noted in the Vera sub-forum, I'm pretty disappointed so far in my VeraLite. It's been very frustrating, and even with the one device I've managed to get installed, it's quite slow.

I'm thinking about trying the Aeon Labs Z-Stick. As I understand it, this will appear on the host computer as a serial device, allowing me to send & receive data to connected Z-Wave devices directly.

To bring MySensors into it, I guess I would build a gateway as another serial device, and attach that to the same computer.

I would then end up writing my own controller software, but as a software engineer, that's the part that doesn't worry me too much (provided I can find details for all the APIs I would need to use).

My chief concern is response time: when I smack a Z-Wave or MySensors switch, the corresponding lights or whatever need to toggle within a second or less. So far, Vera's not doing that (though it could be I don't yet have it configured correctly).

What do you think? Is a home-brew controller built around the Z-Stick a reasonable option to try?

I'm getting into HA primarily because the switches in my house are poorly placed. Rather than rewire the whole house, which I expect to be expensive and perhaps unsatisfactory, I thought I'd "just" put wireless switches where I want them, and get all the benefits of HA to boot.

$300 and about 4 hours of fiddling in, I'm starting to have regrets. I was only able to get 1 of my 4 devices connected to my VeraLite, and now that I have, it seems painfully slow. My procedure this morning was:

1. Wake up, grab my iPhone, launch the Vera app.
2. Watch the "thanks for your patience" spinner spin 52 times (I counted).
3. Stare in amazement as I am told "no device detected".
4. 10 seconds later, the app changes its mind and says my installation is OK.
5. Switch to Devices, and toggle the on/off state of my test device (an Aeon Smart Energy Switch).
6. Wait about another six seconds, and... it switches! Hooray!

Compare this to the current procedure of get up, stumble over to the poorly-located wall switch, smack it, and see the light come instantly on.

Now, of course I haven't tried it with an actual Z-Wave wall switch yet (that's one of the devices I couldn't get connected to VeraLite). But if it's this slow with one device in the loop, it's hard to see how it's going to be faster when there are two (the input and the output).

The reason I'm whining about this here is that (1) this forum seems full of amazingly knowledgeable and helpful people who understand HA far better than I do, and (2) I'm wondering if I should send the VeraLite back and do something else.

Are there other controllers that would have a faster response time? Or is there something wrong with my VeraLite or how it's configured?

Or is what I'm attempting to do not possible? I need a complete intention-to-lights-on cycle of a few seconds at most, i.e., not much different from a hard-wired switch.

Note that, as someone else on these forums pointed out, having DIY stuff controlling line level voltage probably isn't a good idea, for insurance reasons if nothing else. Otherwise I'd be tempted to hang the controller entirely and just sprinkle my own WiFi modules around the house. But I think it's better to stick to certified Z-Wave modules for those.

Feeling frustrated by the yawning chasm between the hype and the reality here... any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

• Joe

OK, it's beginning to become clear. My initial gadgets & gizmos should arrive today, so I'll start tinkering, and I'm sure more clarity will come.

Thanks for the quick responses, and for your patience. This is so far the best HA forum I've found anywhere!

Thanks. Just one more question for now, and then I'll quit pestering you:

If it's possible to create a WiFi device with Arduino that talks to Vera directly, then why use the gateway? What are the pros and cons of each approach?

OK, that's fair enough... though I would suggest that a pre-built (and programmed) gateway for each of the major HA controllers, plus maybe just a couple of pre-built modules (something simple, like a light sensor and a lamp relay) would help people get in and have confidence that it's going to work before they roll up their sleeves and learn to DIY.

In my case, I've used Arduino before, but I've also tinkered with radio transmission enough to know that I don't care for it much... I've had problems with interference, linking, etc. You guys all seem like amazingly cool froods who all know where your towel is, so I'm happy to give it a try. The cost savings over off-the-shelf ZWave modules is quite dramatic ($115 for a dimmer, really Kichler?!?).

What's really bugging me, I guess, is that it seems a bit rube-goldbergish to fill my house with (1) WiFi signals at 2.4 GHz, (2) Z-Wave signals at 900 MHz, and (3) MySensors signals at 2.4 GHz again. (Hey, will WiFi and MySensors interfere with each other?)

If I have to power a 2.4 GHz radio on the dimmer module, I wonder if I can't bypass the MySensors gateway, and instead throw on a WiFi module and speak to it directly. But that may be a more difficult path.

At any rate, you've given me a lot to think about, and I'm looking forward to tinkering with all this (and dragging my two boys into it with me!).

Thanks, that's quite helpful.

I'm still a bit confused about the gateway. I gather that this is a box that connects physically to the Vera (via Ethernet or USB) and then speaks some completely unrelated radio protocol to the various MySensors modules around the house.

But I've read through the impressive list of products at the MySensors store, and I don't see a gateway. I did find the instructions for building a serial gateway, but man, that looks like a lot of work just to get started. Is there really no off-the-shelf, pre-programmed gateway I can buy so as to focus on the sensors and actuators right away?

I'm completely new to this — my VeraLite is coming tomorrow — but one of the things I want to do is to control dimmable 12V LED strings from my Z-Wave home automation system.

There appears to be a surprising lack of off-the-shelf Z-Wave modules for this. I know how to control the lights from an Arduino board, but not how to control the Arduino board by Z-Wave. Some googling led me here, but it seems that the focus here is on creating new sensors (inputs)... I'm trying to create a custom output.

Am I in the right place? And what sort of hardware would I need to add to my Arduino to interface with the Z-Wave network?