With the Caseta Connect plugin being withdrawn. Is there any other solution for integrating with Caseta? This will have a severe impact on my migration to using Vera.
If there are no other options for integrating Lutron Caseta with Vera then I will have to look for an alternative to Vera.
Seriously? I was JUST ABOUT TO BUY a few Caseta products, and (because I’ve learned the wisdom of Googling <> +VERA before purchasing anything…) come to find out the requisite plug-in is being discontinued?!?
C’mon! :-/
Hmm, maybe now that they both have IFTTT support you can do some basic connections that way?
You would need to sign up for the IFTTT Vera Beta to try it out. If you don’t need a super snappy response time? Hmm now that I think about it. Don’t know if either the Caseta or Vera can be the “this” or if they only support being the “that”.
Yeah pay for expensive local lighting control to then ship it off to IFTTT for delayed responses? Uhhh no. Other systems support Caseta… SmartThings, Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Hubitat, etc etc…
…and Wink, Alexa, HomeKit as well. In fact, I could not envision Vera NOT supporting those Lutron Caseta devices.
Which is why I accidentally ordered some on eBay, but thankfully saw the warnings on this Forum and managed to cancel my order in time.
For now, am making do with my Aeon Labs Minimote, acting as a scene controller to do what I had intended the Caseta Lamp Dimmer + Remote for – but the Aeon’s battery life leaves a lot to be desired.
Will keep an eye on this thread. It’s always a bummer when a perfectly good plug-in gets nixed (why??), when Vera could just as easily adopt/adapt the same feature set natively!
It is very frustrating. I bought a Wink 2 and it arrived right after that plugin was withdrawn. I use it to control my Zigbee lights, but currently have no way to link the Wink with Vera.
IFTTT was mentioned as an option, but you can’t just join the beta. You have to be selected. I requested to join right when it was announced and have yet to get that permission.
Hopefully, Vera will start developing some plugins of their own soon. It seems they run off developers over time, leaving tons of broken and unsupported plugins behind.
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So far Vera is terrible about developing/supporting their own plugins and integrations with 3rd parties. My complaints to support about plugins are “oh well they’re community developed”. Now there are some decent plugins that are available. But a whole lot of them that were once driving factors for Vera are now abandoned.
The plugin marketplace is still a UI5 piece of technology. AFAIK, it has not had any significant attention for years, and gets no attention today, except to do the weekly review and approval of update requests. But it’s a cesspool of old, rotted code that no longer works that’s a minefield for newcomers and I think unsells their product. It is, in my view, a reflection of their attitude toward plugins and the plugin developer community. Vera seems focused on chasing long lists of supported devices, rather than enhancing the core operation of the system to allow you to actually do things with those devices. While some of us can code any extension we want, I think most users would find Vera completely unusable without PLEG, as even the most basic automations by today’s standards can’t be done out of the box. PLEG makes Vera usable, even competitive. On the bad side, though, I think its existence has also allowed Vera to be lazy and not address the shortcomings in its own automation capability for itself, and Vera and PLEG together may be falling into the “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” trap. Another important project is ALTUI. If those projects ever lose support of their respective developers, I feel Vera is walking dead.
And then there are the stability issues, but that’s a horse well-beaten elsewhere.
As for the marketplace I fully agree. It needs an overhaul as badly as these forums do. Vera needs to step up their game and enter the modern world.
Back to topic on Lutron Caseta. I was finally able to get the Lutron RadioRA 2 plugin to work. It took a while and a lot of pateience as it works in the background with NO status information or anything. But it did finally display my switches and remotes was controlling them. I’m testing with some automations to see if it really is going to work. The side note is that this requires a PRO bridge not the standard one you can buy at Lowes or Home Depot. I don’t mind this, as a lot of automation systems have the PRO requirement. But it is sad that other systems like SmartThings and Home Assistant do work and work well with a Caseta bridge without any fuss and does not require it to be a PRO version.
Now back to the shortcomings of Vera. I completely agree that without PLEG Vera automation would not cut it. However I can also say the same about SmartThings that without WebCoRE SmartThings is basically unusable for anything beyond basics, very much like Vera but without the ability to easilly write code for the shortcomings.
In short I think Vera is a very powerful system but is absolutely NOT a user friendly system which I think is why a lot of integrators use Vera and also why it’s not sold at local stores. Whereas SmartThings is more user friendly (at face value) but then becomes NOT user friendly and I don’t even think dev friendly and I’m not afraid of coding.
Speaking of AltUI, well I’ve been playing with Home Assistant a lot and I find it to be a better UI and supplemental rule system on top of Vera than AltUI and the amount of plugins and integrations available are great. I have my core functions (device management, critical automations) running in Vera and my fun stuff (text to speech, multimedia etc) running in Home Assistant. So far it’s working well.
You’re not alone with that choice–I do the same. I’ve been migrating my automations over to Home Assistant for the past several months. It’s… better. UI is better, as you say, but also the reduced load on the Vera seems to make it less troublesome. Although, I’ve had issues with Hass’ stability in communicating with Vera. Reloads of Luup will sometimes stop (crash) pyvera’s update loop thread, and your Vera-device-triggered automations then stop working (no device status updates being fetched) although changing states still works (sending actions to Vera not impacted). I’ve recently done a fix for this and sent it back in a pull request to the developers of pyvera, if you’re interested. It’s on my GitHub (GitHub - toggledbits/pyvera: A python library to control devices via the Vera hub). I run Hassio, under docker. Your installation may perform differently, as the bug mostly arises due to Hassio’s mix of modules. But I also use a Z-stick with Hass, and I’m at the point where I’m wondering what Vera is offering me that the Z-stick doesn’t, other than being an extra piece of plumbing I have to worry about.
I won’t hi-jack your Caseta thread further, but to say that if the lower-end bridge works well with Hass, there’s likely some python code somewhere that could serve as a guide for doing the same in Lua.
There is python code available. I have it and I’m looking at porting to lua. Just don’t have the time. I have a caseta PRO bridge so I’m using it that way for now.
I like having the mix of hass and vera and I’ll check out your github for the pyvera patch. I have found that I like my light automations done through Vera either a scene or PLEG for the speed. The rest of them can be in hass.
Just to bring this back around.
Vera will likely never natively support Caseta because uses a proprietary Radio. You either have to have a Wink or Caseta Hub, even when going to Homeseer etc.
Yes it is the Lutron ClearConnect protocol. The complaint is not Vera supporting at a hardware level. The complaint is not supporting it with better integration at the software level. There is a plugin currently that will work with the PRO line of bridges, but not standard bridges which are what most people will have or buy.
Most other automation platforms support Lutron Caseta through integrations, why can’t Vera? Why does Vera leave that to the community to build plugins for something that customers want and would be a marketing point for them. Rather they market features that don’t even work correctly (geofencing) 
Sorry cheap shot… had to…
It looks like the original, “main” thread for this plugin has been closed.
In case anybody needs that plugin, here is a copy
That zip file also includes a file (L_CasetaConnect.lua_fixed) with fixes for 2-button Pico remotes.
Link removed per developer’s request.
Awesome to have a copy of the original plugin.
If the different plugins posted here are not under strict copyright I think a github would be great for keeping plugins, organized and safe!
I cannot access the file
Browser say: Can?t connect securely to this page
[quote=“sjakub, post:14, topic:198609”]It looks like the original, “main” thread for this plugin has been closed.
In case anybody needs that plugin, here is a copy:
That zip file also includes a file (L_CasetaConnect.lua_fixed) with fixes for 2-button Pico remotes.[/quote]
Link removed per developer’s request.
We asked for samples from Lutron. As soon as we’ll have them, we will R&D,
Thanks - This is critically important (to me, and I am sure many others)!
So it looks like the author of the original plugin has some strong feeling against it being distributed.
Despite the fact that according to the license in the source files, that plugin is not only open source,
but even uses GPL license. Regardless, forum moderators chose to respect his wishes.
I still have the plugin, but I won’t post links to it in this topic.
However, given the GPL license, it should be possible for anybody to post it on github or somewhere else and continue developing it.
But it may not be needed if we get an official version. Fingers crossed that it happens soon!
[quote=“sjakub, post:19, topic:198609”]Despite the fact that according to the license in the source files, that plugin is not only open source,
but even uses GPL license.[/quote]
There are two files in the plugin that state a license… One is a file originally created as part of the underlying system that has been modified for for use by the plugin and is GPL. One is a file that was provided in the ALTUI package by amg0 and modified to give the plugin openLuup/ALTUI compatibility is a freeware license.
The rest of the files do not include a license statement, therefore they are NOT GPL… The functional code of the plugin is a copyright work, and as it has been released as free software, those that currently have the plugin have the right to USE the plugin. There is absolutely no right to distribute the plugin.
This is the reason that Vera Controls will not modify most of the plugins in the app marketplace themselves… Most plugins, although freely available, do not contain a license statement, and are therefore copyright works.
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