Anyone else giving up on Z-wave? (or Vera)

[quote=“Tonnystark, post:1, topic:200353”]I purchased a Veralite about 2 years ago and use it to mostly to run light dimmers (Linear Brand). They’ve always worked… kinda, but it’s pretty frustrating that 5% it just doesn’t respond. A few other gripes I have with it is the difficulty of setting up/pairing new devices and the latency can be up even 10 seconds sometimes.

I also have a Philips Hue system and Echo setup and in comparison it works flawlessly. I understand that Wifi has disadvantages of range and likely takes more energy but I am about fed up with the Vera, and probably Z-wave in general.

Anyone else share similar thoughts?[/quote]

I started on the vera 3, and now vera plus.

the last few month, my vera shows “Error in lua scritps or scenes” every 8 hours to 2 weeks, problem is that every script stops when this happens, and a reload of the engine normaly fixes the problem (no change to ANY script, just an reload)

a bit sad as my home alarm is running i scripts…

and battery life under vera, also NEEDS to be fixed. also having an Z-wave.me running with some of the same components, under z-wave.me running for 1 year, battery down to 60%, under vera, i’m on my second battery. and yes, in the some room, and side be side. motion detectors, and smoke detectors with sirenes have been testet.

so, yes… unless a new firmware with LOTS of fixes within the next 6 weeks, i’m off to a different controller

Support, have not been able to help :frowning:

Moved almost everything to Homeassistant on a Raspberry Pi. Very simply has too many issues for me…

Hi All,

I have a number of controllers and to be honest find Vera the easiest one to work with, yes many problems and concerns. What platform doesn’t? Vera in my opinion is the best for the DIY.

Would a love to see my system not go down or have issues? Absolutely…

Remember we are not paying for support, once the system is purchased support comes with it, purchase a computer some cost $$$$$.

I will be with Vera and would love more integration between hubs, that is the perfect fix use the best of each hub.

Good luck

There are pluses and minuses associated with each and every hub. (Although some have more pluses than minuses).
I personally have tried (and still have in a closet):
smartthings
hubitat
home assistant
homeseer
vera plus
zipabox

I’m still looking for that all round “best” solution. I’m looking forward to what the new owners of Vera will come up with. I suspect that by the end of March 2019, they will have come out with new hardware and new software.

For what it is worth, here are my two cents…

There are 3 fundamental aspects to home automation - 1) protocol 2) devices and 3) controllers.

1) Protocol (network fabric) - The front runners are Z-Wave and Zigbee with BLE 5.1 (Mesh) holding a lot of promise but lacks broad adoption because it is early in it’s lifecycle. WiFi is not an HA protocol although some would like to make it that; WiFi just isn’t designed for efficient low-power device operation. I personally think it is a huge mistake to populate your WiFi network with WiFi/IP devices from China because they have access to your main network and run behind your firewall (the ideal trojan horse scenario). For example, there have been countless security exploits with WiFi cameras. Said another way, using a completely separate purpose-built and secure HA network fabric like Z-Wave greatly reduces the surface area for an exploit of your home WiFi system that hosts your most sensitive information and infrastructure.

2) Devices (sensors and actuators) - Depending upon your needs/use cases, you may find devices for Z-Wave, Zigbee, BLE and WiFi that suit your purpose. From my own personal experience, I have yet to find a device for an alternate protocol that wasn’t available on Z-Wave. With Goggle’s pushing Thread and Samsung’s SmartThings, the Zigbee gap has closed but there are still more interoperability issues on Zigbee than the longer-standing Z-wave ecosystem because the Zigbee standards are looser.

3) Controllers (orchestration/automation) - Most HA protocols/standards include simple automation through mechanisms like Z-Wave’s direct device-associations so you can do things like turn a light on when a sensor is tripped, etc. However, a robust and capable HA system requires broader and more sophisticated orchestration that is not possible without a controller that serves as the brain for you HA. The ideal controller will be extensible through plugins to encourage developers and enable users to solve their specific problems easily. Furthermore, the controller should be able to integrate with multiple protocols and devices to address the broadest set of end user needs and maintain cadence with current trends such as voice-control (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana). And of course, ideally the HA controller platform is well-supported and has a large developer community.

Perspective (the grass isn’t always greener) - Right now, Z-Wave is broadly adopted, supported, secure and more standardized than Zigbee with a myriad of devices being available to suit most HA use cases. I personally standardized on Z-Wave for my network fabric years ago (circa Vera 3) but devices that “speak other protocols” are components of my total solution (I am one of the original MySensors developers) however, I choose to use a single HA controller for automation orchestration. It is important to not confuse an HA Controller (i.e. Vera, Habitat, SmartThings, OpenHab, etc.) with the HA Protocol/network fabric (Z-Wave, Zigbee, etc).

I’ve been a long time Vera user and I’ve taken a cursory look at every new thing that comes along but I still run my HA systems (my primary home, a vacation home and my 85-year old mother’s home) on Vera Plus’ right now. The Vera is still a front-runner with it’s Lua/luup extensibility and broad developer/community support that allows end users to bridge the Vera to other modalities such as Homekit for Siri support (which I do).

As my HA demands have increased, I have never found a use case that I couldn’t solve with the Vera and community extensions. Yes, I have certainly experienced Vera’s mysterious and frustrating failing under load but that is a solvable problem and often can be mitigated by examining the logs, identifying the root cause/pattern and adjusting the configuration to avoid the failure scenario (I’m in the midst of trying to figure one out). The Vera Customer Support Team is very quick to help users when they take the time to ask and have spent countless hours with me to fix a number of issues with my systems.

Furthermore, if you visit the forums for other HA controllers, you will find that it isn’t a bed of roses either and that they suffer from their own set of problems - SmartThings cloud-responsiveness, Hubitat’s maturity (e.g. lack of udp support), Homeseer’s pricing model, OpenHab’s complexity, etc. At this point there still isn’t a perfect controller but remarkably, even though the Vera development cadence has waned due to lack of resources, the fundamental architectural/design choices have withstood the test of time and for now, Vera remains my controller of choice until some TBD player really upsets the HA market by doing something uniquely different and better than what currently exists - that may never happen.

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Thanks for taking the time to write that. Very interesting read.

C

My Short answer is: Though, I have been tempted, at the end no.

  1. Zwave: There is no alternative as blacey mentionned because: Zigbee and bluetooth (and wifi as well) are both on 2.4GHz which is already super crowded. Higher RF frequency means higher potential bandwidth but also shorter range/power ratio. For these two reasons, they will always be inferior to Z-wave in the long run. Even though the Zigbee protocol was designed to compensate for the range/power disadvantage, the 2.4GHz RF crowding and interference issue remains (microwave, phone, wifi, etc…). Zwave also offers the broadest range of interoperable devices even though indeed a number of interesting Zigbee exclusive devices exist, I have so far been able to integrate them into the vera even though none of mine are officially supported.

  2. Vera: I am a bit too committed to it and have already built my entire automation in Lua on openLuup and turned the vera into a device bridge. If I was to start from scratch, I may look at something different. Hubitat and homeassistant and to a lesser degree Homeseer but for now I have done enough work on the vera to make it reasonably stable bridge as stability is indeed it’s Achilles’ heel…

Technical question, if I may: With openLuup, could you not (comparatively simply) migrate to something like Razbian given that (as I understand it) your Vera is now just a ‘dumb’ radio transmitter?

Just curious as I’m still right at the bottom of the learning ‘curve’ :slight_smile:

C

Technical question, if I may: With openLuup, could you not (comparatively simply) migrate to something like Razbian given that (as I understand it) your Vera is now just a ‘dumb’ radio transmitter?

Just curious as I’m still right at the bottom of the learning ‘curve’ :slight_smile:

C[/quote]

openLuup just runs on Lua and it is the beauty of it, much like Java, it is a language and quite platform neutral. It can be built and run on razbian or almost any other OS (macOS, linux, windows) as long as you have the library. If by razbian, you mean the zwave.me radio razberry, there is indeed a plugin for Z-way and I could replace the vera with a Z-way/Razberry but the community support there is weaker than on Vera and the Russian ownership has been quite slow to usefully respond to some inquiries. If you mean to replace openLuup with a Razbian/Z-way controller, I could do this too but all my Lua code would need to be rewritten and I would need a plugin on Z-way to make it connect to the vera which does not exist and I would see no advantage in doing it since I prefer openLuup as a controller given the depth of commitment and understanding I accumulated for it. All credits to AKbooer for creating an outstanding platform mimicking the vera from scratch.

I have even gone as far as attempting to run the mios luup engine on a different platform to see if I could run it on more powerful hardware but it is a binary built on MIPS 32bit. I stopped short of testing it on a virtual machine/emulator. mios used to provide a version of UI4 built on windows but not anymore…

Thanks. Clearly I’m not quite clear on how it works :slight_smile:

More to learn!

Cheers

C

[quote=“Tonnystark, post:1, topic:200353”]I am about fed up with the Vera, and probably Z-wave in general.

Anyone else share similar thoughts?[/quote]

I was in your shoes, and my solution was the same as below.

I dumped Vera several months ago. Too many problems, then FW update bricked it. I moved to Hubitat and now have stable, fast, and 100% local home control.

I am sporadically seeing this too…

I am sporadically seeing this too…[/quote]

This is odd and I just experienced something similar a few days ago as well. May deserve a separate thread. It points to me to either a bug in the engine which I can?t point to or a data corruption within the RAM. Since a Luup reload fixes it. The written data must be ok and so is the data in the zwave module. I used to have random problems after a luup reload due to timing and various lag in loading different lua codes but I have not had any post luup reload lua code error since I offloaded the vera. This is really an odd one.

I clearly don’t have has many posts as you guys and maybe I am lucky or have a simple setup, but my Vera has been rock solid. I had numerous issues about 2 years ago, but since then nothing. I have around 100 devices, mostly z-wave, but some zigbee. I continue to add devices as I find them on sale. I have switches, dimmers, outlets, thermostats, motion sensor, door locks, window blinds, sirens, door sensors, cameras, garage door opener interfaces…

My only gripe is the seemingly absent user group. Whenever I google an issue, the only hits are the SmartThings community. For example, I was having difficulty connecting my Linear garage door modules to my new Ryobi openers. Only place I could find the solution was on the ST forums…

And tonight I did a reload (so stupid activating/deactivating a scene requires reload) and got a “EnOcean Gateway[15] : Failed to open IO Port”. This shouldn’t be happening. Years with the same configuration, and these lua startup errors just started.

I did a manual reload, same error. Rebooted, and Vera came up fine. This is what I think I have been seeing - Vera Luup reloads no longer coming up clean on a regular basis. Reboot - and it comes up clean. I have reason to think this is not firmware related - I just updated to the latest two weeks ago and had seen it prior. I think something on the backend is jacking with Luup reloads. And I don’t have a clue how to catch it, other than a deep dive in the logs.

This is a bit scary. Next time this happens, you may want to try doing the manual luup reload multiple times to see if it comes and goes like it did for me a some time ago. This indicates a timing issue in the data load between the scene lua codes and the startup lua in large part caused by the slow CPU and storage.

And tonight I did a reload (so stupid activating/deactivating a scene requires reload) and got a “EnOcean Gateway[15] : Failed to open IO Port”. This shouldn’t be happening. Years with the same configuration, and these lua startup errors just started.

I did a manual reload, same error. Rebooted, and Vera came up fine. This is what I think I have been seeing - Vera Luup reloads no longer coming up clean on a regular basis. Reboot - and it comes up clean. I have reason to think this is not firmware related - I just updated to the latest two weeks ago and had seen it prior. I think something on the backend is jacking with Luup reloads. And I don’t have a clue how to catch it, other than a deep dive in the logs.[/quote]
I have also notice issues where symptoms are scene not executing and found nil values referenced in the logs and the luup engine does not load successfully, also tried manual reloads but only a reboot seems to clear it. Hopefully this won?t be a reoccurring theme :-/.

[quote=“yellowmonster, post:21, topic:200353”]I clearly don’t have has many posts as you guys and maybe I am lucky or have a simple setup, but my Vera has been rock solid. I had numerous issues about 2 years ago, but since then nothing. I have around 100 devices, mostly z-wave, but some zigbee. I continue to add devices as I find them on sale. I have switches, dimmers, outlets, thermostats, motion sensor, door locks, window blinds, sirens, door sensors, cameras, garage door opener interfaces…

My only gripe is the seemingly absent user group. Whenever I google an issue, the only hits are the SmartThings community. For example, I was having difficulty connecting my Linear garage door modules to my new Ryobi openers. Only place I could find the solution was on the ST forums…[/quote]

YellowMonster,

I’m serious about starting a Home Automation User’s Group based on my posted message on this forum a few weeks ago. I will post it below. Are you interested in getting it off the ground. I have the entire concept in my head and need to put more on paper and come up with a great forum concept. Check out the site I want to model it after: [url=https://forum.xda-developers.com/]https://forum.xda-developers.com/[/url]

Here is the post I submitted in two different sections within this forum. I was surprised that very few people responded. This has the potential to really blow up and become successful. What do you think?

Micasaverde Forum is so confusing!!!..
? on: January 08, 2019, 05:43:15 pm ?
QuoteModifyRemove
Has anybody thought about creating a new forum that would be broken down into specific topics that make more sense? I would begin by really controlling the moderation and laying ground rules in order that everyone follows the proper protocol. The best forum structure and control would be like the one for XDA Developers.
It’s very important to keep it very organized. I would include a free marketplace with a rating system. A deals page that would be official editor’s Choice recommendations and have a format that is a hybrid of SlickDeals and Dealnews. What an AppStore? Anybody agree that this forum can be very frustrating?

There could be topics for the following:

a Zigbee forum
voice control platforms
a how-to forum
product specific forums
voice control platforms, one for “Alexa” and one for “Okay Google”
a how-to forum
product eco-systems
Wyze Cam Cameras
Camera Surveillance Platforms
Raspberry Pi 3
Raspberry Pi A
Raspberry Pi A W
Relays
Sensors
Smoke Detectors and CO Sensors
Raspberry Pi A
Experimental Projects and Ideas
Irrigation Control
Arduino
ZoneMinderl
Blue Iris
Webcams
Raspberry Pi Cameras
voice control platforms
Electrical Outlets
Dimmers & Switches
LCD RGB Lighting
Bathroom lighting
Kitchen lighting
Heating & Cooling, i.e. thermostats
Split ACs
Remote Controls
Home Entertainment
Android Entertainment boxes, like the Nvidia Shield or the Google Player
Xiaomi Products
Home Security
Home Surveillance
Door Locks
Occupancy Sensors
FOBs
RFID
Relays
Relay Projects
Garage Door Openers
Sirens, Chimes, Strobes and alerting
Blinds & Window Covering Control
Doorbell Integration
Weather Stations
Alarms
Alarm Panel Integration
IOS Apps
Android Apps
Relays

what does everybody think?

Yes and almost (to the thread topic).
I have a Vera Lite unit on UI5. Its been going for 5 years or so, I guess. I don’t have a huge amount of devices but the ones I have I really like. automatic lights, primarily. Recently the unit has become unreliable. I have to reboot it often to get it to do its thing again. Not locking the front door when I leave is an issue as we have become dependent on it. So I thought about upgrading or removing Z-wave altogether.

My toilet light switch module broke a while ago so I replaced it with a hard switch. And I realise I don’t like that so I am now thinking what is the next move in HA. With Google and Amazon voice controlled systems I figured there must be much better technology and advances now.
I was quite surprised to find Vera was still on UI7. I thought about UI7 years ago and even installed it for a while, deciding I didn’t like it I went back to UI5.
So, I am going to upgrade but its not going to be Vera. I haven’t fully decided yet but am currently thinking Homeseer.

The deciding factor to stick with Z-wave was the Home automation bridge (link below) which is supposed to bring Google and Amazon’s HA into the whole picture. I like what they’re doing but there is still a ways to go for them to be able to turn on light fixture so I will stick with Z-wave and hopefully use the Google/Amazon to link voice control into it. I don’t any of that technology yet so don’t know how feasible that is.