Flair Vent is a new product coming out that has sparked my interest so I thought I’d start a thread about it here for those of us with the desire for integration into the Vera echo system.
founder @flair here. I think I talked to you @sammy2 on our https://forum.flair.co - I don’t know a ton about vera but I had a couple questions in terms of radios. So we use a 915Mhz radio for Flair device to Flair device - we didn’t trust 2.4ghz for the challenging RF environment of vents (ductwork mostly). But our puck has bluetooth and wifi - would it be possible to do an integration through those?
For Wifi - we will be enabling a locally hosted (on our puck) api that would be one way to grab data and set vent states. We wont ship it with that but we have worked hard on our bootloader and can push new code to all three mcu’s onboard.
Another would be to do the data exchange over ble. Normally we use ble as a beacon but its actually pretty easy to drop firmware on and share that way.
The main questions in my head are:
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our algorithms leverage historical data and do some fancy math on our cloud to optimally operate the vents (unlike some of the competition, we do more than pet vents with manual control). would it be enough to expose manual control over bluetooth/wifi for offline usage?
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our bluetooth portion is fairly important in terms of location awareness. Can that be posted directly to the vera?
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does vera ever write the integrations. We are planning on exposing a local Wifi API but I don’t really want to commit to tons of work on a plugin since I don’t really know demand for this platform. but if we could just make sure the documentation was clear and that beacon data was able to be posted to a local resource (perhaps hosted on the vera hardware), would that possibly work?
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Our Puck also has IR in and out. Is this something people are interested in? How would that work with vera? At the moment the main use cases are minisplits/heatpumps/windowacs
[quote=“dandroid88, post:2, topic:192564”]founder @flair here. I think I talked to you @sammy2 on our https://forum.flair.co - I don’t know a ton about vera but I had a couple questions in terms of radios. So we use a 915Mhz radio for Flair device to Flair device - we didn’t trust 2.4ghz for the challenging RF environment of vents (ductwork mostly). But our puck has bluetooth and wifi - would it be possible to do an integration through those?
For Wifi - we will be enabling a locally hosted (on our puck) api that would be one way to grab data and set vent states. We wont ship it with that but we have worked hard on our bootloader and can push new code to all three mcu’s onboard.
Another would be to do the data exchange over ble. Normally we use ble as a beacon but its actually pretty easy to drop firmware on and share that way.
The main questions in my head are:
-
our algorithms leverage historical data and do some fancy math on our cloud to optimally operate the vents (unlike some of the competition, we do more than pet vents with manual control). would it be enough to expose manual control over bluetooth/wifi for offline usage?
-
our bluetooth portion is fairly important in terms of location awareness. Can that be posted directly to the vera?
-
does vera ever write the integrations. We are planning on exposing a local Wifi API but I don’t really want to commit to tons of work on a plugin since I don’t really know demand for this platform. but if we could just make sure the documentation was clear and that beacon data was able to be posted to a local resource (perhaps hosted on the vera hardware), would that possibly work?
-
Our Puck also has IR in and out. Is this something people are interested in? How would that work with vera? At the moment the main use cases are minisplits/heatpumps/windowacs[/quote]
I want to let you know that I read your post but don’t know enough to provide a good response on how to do the integration. Hopefully someone here with more knowledge than I can help out with this. That said, I will re-read your comments and do a little research on things too.
I think so. Just barely purchased a VeraSecure but I’m anxious to integrate it with my flair pucks and vents as soon as our HVAC installation is finished.
So are you saying that your puck isn’t configured to open its service by default but that it can be enabled through updating the firmware or triggering some kind of code push?
[quote=“dandroid88, post:2, topic:192564”]The main questions in my head are:
- our algorithms leverage historical data and do some fancy math on our cloud to optimally operate the vents (unlike some of the competition, we do more than pet vents with manual control). would it be enough to expose manual control over bluetooth/wifi for offline usage?[/quote]
I’m sure that would be a good start, but it would be nice if you provided some kind of API access to the cloud portions of your infrastructure so that they could be more closely integrated when your Vera is online. Also, since your business model is primarily hardware-dependent, it would be great if you were willing to open-source your algorithms so that they could be adapted to run on-premises in offline mode.
I know Vera has geofencing features and other types of custom events that I believe can be triggered via API calls. So it seems like it should be possible to integrate Flair’s bluetooth awareness with Vera. I would need to understand better how location awareness works in Flair and learn more about Vera’s capabilities, but I’m assuming a lot of interesting things are possible. I assume the location you’re talking about is more logical than geographical, i.e. Flair knows when the user is close to one puck vs another but not necessarily what the user’s current lat and lon are.
I would be willing to help write the integration. I have over 20 years of full-stack software engineering experience.
Curious to learn how well this works, considering pucks can be placed at odd locations in relation to the mini-splits. I suspect the other omnidirectional comms protocols would be of greater interest to people, but there may be some interesting ways of leveraging it. There probably are some home automation sensors that integrate with z-wave, zigbee etc that do IR comms as well, for certain niche products.
I’m anxious to help if I can.