wink hub 2?

[James Sentman]

In my mind I treat the Vera as a simple interface. I don’t use any of it’s internal logic or plugins or other capabilities at all. That lets me keep what it does simple and less prone to errors, latency and just general weirdness. I would recommend that everyone treat it that way. It’s really not that much more expensive than some of the other smarter ZWave interfaces out there.

The problem with the ZStick support is that it pretty much has to be based on OpenZWave. They have made tremendous progress with that in the last few years and I believe can support secure devices like door locks where they couldn’t before. It is a drastically lower level interface than anything else we’ve done. It would be a very large project and require constant updates for new devices and new OpenZWave updates. I’m not against doing this someday and indeed just a week ago or so i downloaded the latest source to build and have a look at it. There seems to be a real dearth of documentation unfortunately. They seem to assume that if you’re reading their code that you understand how to put together raw ZWave packets which I am only just learning to do and it’s not going to be simple.

With the Vera we’re reliant on Vera to support new things or to fix bugs, which is a pain. With this we’d be reliant on the OpenZWave folks to fix bugs and add new things and they are hacking it out one byte at a time. I’m not sure we’d get better or faster support for things going that route. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to become much of an active participant in hacking things out and contributing to their source, though where I could I certainly would.

You should just think of the Vera as a ZWave interface that happens to have an ethernet jack instead of a usb plug. If you don’t use it’s internal logic, which you don’t need to, then it doesn’t really complicate things beyond the directly connected ZWave dongles.

i am continuing to watch this and may very well dive in and start working on it in the next year or so, but it isn’t going to be before that as there are too many other things on the list and the Vera really does work just fine as long as you don’t overwhelm it with lots of apps or tons of unnecessary internal logic.



> On Jul 22, 2018, at 5:36 PM, Jack Stewart <jacks at amug.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi James,
> Just sitting here reading the mail an am reminded that I would love it if you would build support for Z-Wave into XTension thus having “home automation” in a single box.
> As you know, I run multiple systems and even adding just Vera geometrically complicates my maintenance issues.
> Jack

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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