New Vera Plus bricked?

Community Playground Getting Started & Initial Setup
#1

Hi

Got a brand new Vera Plus today and now its dead.

Initially I could see my router had detected a new device on IP 192.168.0.250 and the Wifi on my laptop was seeing the mios wifi.

I went to the Vera website and selected the option to setup a new controller it ran through a setup wizard and said it was then updating and it listed some videos for me to watch whilst I was waiting.

Waited about an hour and nothing seemed to be happening, so I pulled the power on the Vera Plus.

Now if you turn it on I just get a solid power light and no other lights lit up.

I tried factory resetting it by pressing the reset button 6 times but that seems to do nothing and no lights flash in response.

I then tried holding the reset button whilst inserting the DC power lead, this results in all the lights coming on solid apart from the power light which then constently flashes.

Vera support say the unit is now toast and I should RMA it for a replacement.

Looking on the forum it looks like lots of new Vera Plus users have faced similar setup problems.

So is this a cloud based issue with Veras setup process?

Can I recover the unit anyway? Or does it need to be sent back for a replacement? And will the same thing just happen again with another new unit?

Thanks.

#2

I should add I can no longer ping the Vera Plus so cant ssh into it either currently.

#3

Yeah, not the first story like this I’ve read about.

I have a Vera Plus that is working… but another brand new one in a box I’m questioning if it will get bricked.

#4

Yeah I saw a thread earlier mainly from posts around Jan 2018 with several new Vera Plus users and some existing ones saying the initial setup / firmware updates were bricking their units.

#5

Yep, happened to me. Now I’m finding it impossible to add new Z-Wave devices. I’m beginning to wonder about finding another brand of controller. :frowning:

#6

I’ve used Vera for nearly 10 years and on the whole I’ve been very happy with it and the technical support staff are generally very good.

I wont be switching to SmartThings anytime soon.

However this current issue is a problem, especially if I get a replacement unit and the same thing happens again.

#7

I’m trying to switch to Vera from SmartThings and I’m frankly not been thrilled or very happy with most things. PLEG is a bear to learn and I still haven’t got my head around it yet. Trying to do really simple things seem like they are done backwards. Vera has a serious lack of developer support for third party plugins compared to every other system out there which has been daunting. I even went and bought a Caseta PRO bridge just to have my lights working and that was a pain to get setup correctly. I like the vera system so far only been trying for a couple of months, so we’ll see. I just need to get this PLEG stuff worked out.

#8

There must be something odd going on alright. I?m swapping from SmartThings to a Vera plus too. Had a similar event but somehow, I?m not sure how, I managed to dig it out of its hole. I did do the direct connect thing in amongst all the struggling… not sure if that helped or not.
Some things better than SmartThings… some things worse (Zigbee sure is one of them)… on the whole I?m happy I switched over. I try to keep third party software to a minimum though.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

#9

Yeah PLEG takes time to get your head around it. I’m not an expert by any means but I have some quite complex logic going on in PLEG now for some stuff.

I always stuck to buying Z-Wave devices overall, yes SmartThings can be integrated into a wider range of devices with custom device handlers but do I really wanna use cheap RF 433mhz plugs or whatever when I have a Z-Wave controller?

The amount of times I see on the Facebook Alexa and Google Home groups people saying my TPLink plugs are down or Sonoff eWeLink is down again, I am so glad I never went down the Wifi IP or RF 433mhz HA devices route.

I have a few Philips Hue LED strips for Ambilight with Kodi and use the Vera plugin for Philips Hue, the Harmony plugin for Vera is excellent and more powerful than the ST integration with Harmony as it has a http handler you can send json http commands to from any device or app on your network that supports sending http requests, to control Harmony IR devices.

I have Vera integrated in to my Kodi HTPCs using the Kodi Remote plugin and a few other plugins.

Biggest thing that puts me off ST is that alot of it is still cloud based and cloud dependent.

#10

The BIG third party software that I need is Lutron Caseta integration. The Philips Hue integration is eh…so…so… not great but works for basics. Otherwise I keep it to a minimum and run other “nice” things on other systems. Example I have Home Assistant handling my media related stuff like TTS and playing sound clips on events… why? Because it is soooo easy to setup and just works. But I like Vera for the z-wave stability. But yeah the zigbee support so far… is very lacking even for their “supported” products on their website the support is still lacking. It’s really sad though, that my Home Assistant setup with a usb stick can work with more zigbee products than Vera can. Some day HA will have good support for my garage door opener. Then I’ll have to give a long hard look at whether or not to keep Vera for anything at that point.

I would like to bring it all together into one system. But so far no.

#11

I’ve never been keen on Zigbee due to its fragmented implementation and proprietary protocol stacks used by various manufacturers.

Z-Wave is more plug and play and you can mix and match Z-Wave devices far more easily from different manufacturers, plus Zigbee uses the crowded Wifi 2.4ghz frequency.

For TTS use the Imperihome plugin and the Imperihome app.

You should be using Imperihome as your mobile app to control Vera its excellent and better than ST action tiles from what I see.

I have an always on Android wall mounted tablet and in my Vera scenes have TTS using the Imperihome plugin for Vera.

This send the TTS to the tablet. The tablet is then paired via bluetooth to my Alexa speaker, so all TTS announements are heard.

Or if you have Sonos use the Vera Sonos plugin for TTS.

Or you could use the Vera DLNA plugin with the RV engine for TTS.

#12

All my devices are in one system Vera / Imperihome app.

Makes me laugh on the Facebook voice assistant groups, people actually showing off how many apps they have for their various HA devices!

Think they are all missing the point of HA.

Everything should be integrated into one system and one single control app.

#13

[quote=“cw-kid, post:11, topic:198783”]I’ve never been keen on Zigbee due to its fragmented implementation and proprietary protocol stacks used by various manufacturers.

Z-Wave is more plug and play and you can mix and match Z-Wave devices far more easily from different manufacturers, plus Zigbee uses the crowded Wifi 2.4ghz frequency.

For TTS use the Imperihome plugin and the Imperihome app.

You should be using Imperihome as your mobile app to control Vera its excellent and better than ST action tiles from what I see.

I have an always on Android wall mounted tablet and in my Vera scenes have TTS using the Imperihome plugin for Vera.

This send the TTS to the tablet. The tablet is then paired via bluetooth to my Alexa speaker, so all TTS announements are heard.

Or if you have Sonos use the Vera Sonos plugin for TTS.

Or you could use the Vera DLNA plugin with the RV engine for TTS.[/quote]

I totally agree on the Zigbee view. I don’t care for Zigbee too much. I have a couple of door sensors from SmartThings days and a couple new motion sensors (NYCE Ceiling Mount) and other than the Hue bulbs that I have (3 of them). Otherwise I’m not buying anymore Zigbee without a really good reason for it.

As for the TTS and audio. I don’t have a bunch of tablets that I can just use for wall mounts and for TTS stuff. What I do have are a couple of google home mini’s and a bunch of Alexa dots and echo’s. Unfortunately I can’t pair anything but a tablet/phone to an echo dot, but I can to an Echo and Echo Plus which is cool, I was doing that with a RPi for a bit of testing. But that’s again another box to manage and then I only get TTS to one device.

I have Home Assistant setup to send TTS or media (mp3’s) to my google mini’s currently. That was super easy setup. This is being triggered through Vera with Lua code :slight_smile: How I integrated the Fibaro Button (big red button). This will play an mp3 through the google mini’s. I would like to eventually cut out the pieces and go direct from Vera to google mini, but not sure how just yet. I also have my Xeoma camera system running through Home Assistant and using virtual sensors for motion alerts also TTS through the google mini’s. My home/away presence is also running in Home Assistant and controlling my garage door. The Vera geofence and scenes management is terrible for mobile use, with having to configure each users phone with scenes giving each user super rights… no I don’t think so.

I would like to get this all paired down to one system but I don’t see how without a lot of work/coding to get Vera to do what I want… so I bought a book on Lua and going to read it and learn it. Add Lua to my arsenal.

#14

[quote=“cw-kid, post:1, topic:198783”]Hi

Got a brand new Vera Plus today and now its dead.

Initially I could see my router had detected a new device on IP 192.168.0.250 and the Wifi on my laptop was seeing the mios wifi.

I went to the Vera website and selected the option to setup a new controller it ran through a setup wizard and said it was then updating and it listed some videos for me to watch whilst I was waiting.

Waited about an hour and nothing seemed to be happening, so I pulled the power on the Vera Plus.

Now if you turn it on I just get a solid power light and no other lights lit up.

I tried factory resetting it by pressing the reset button 6 times but that seems to do nothing and no lights flash in response.

I then tried holding the reset button whilst inserting the DC power lead, this results in all the lights coming on solid apart from the power light which then constently flashes.

Vera support say the unit is now toast and I should RMA it for a replacement.

Looking on the forum it looks like lots of new Vera Plus users have faced similar setup problems.

So is this a cloud based issue with Veras setup process?

Can I recover the unit anyway? Or does it need to be sent back for a replacement? And will the same thing just happen again with another new unit?

Thanks.[/quote]

It looks like you already tried the factory reset which has failed. The factory reset tries to load an old base firmware and then when booted from it tries to go look for the latest firmware on the vera server and loads it. Not sure at which stage yours hung. I have had experience avoiding to download the latest firmware but disconnecting my unit from the network forcing it to stay on the old firmware and only reconnecting it after it gives up on trying to download the latest firmware. It is also possible that the firmware image on the drive of your unit is corrupted, in which case, there isn’t much you can do but replace the unit.

#15

When I first upgraded my new Vera Plus, it seemed to somehow corrupt the overlay partition on the upgrade attempt, and fail, and then subsequent reboots left the upgrade script thinking an upgrade was in progress and needed to be finished, but the overlay partition wasn’t properly written, so it could never get past that point. My system had the power light on and nothing else. It would occasionally blink as the device periodically rebooted, but never came fully up.

In my case, I was still able to SSH into the box and look around; its network, DHCP client, and SSH server services were operating. Once in, I could see it was in OpenWRT’s “failsafe” mode trying to complete the upgrade. I found the upgrade log showing the error, repeating messages about attempting to mount the overlay partition, in a file called /tmp/log.mios_firmware. I could see in that file that it was waiting for the filesystem to come ready, but it never did, and never would/could. The messages mentioned the block device name, in my case /dev/mtdblock9, so having some experience with OpenWRT and being totally unafraid of voiding warranties, I ran jffs2reset on that block device, then rebooted. My Vera came up after about 8 minutes. Later, I found reference in older threads in this forum mentioning users being directed to use “flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtdx” (where x is the partition number of the /overlay partition). This would have a similar effect: it erases the filesystem. Oh, and this has to be done fairly quickly, because Vera’s upgrade script eventually times-out trying and reboots the Vera to try again, throwing you off in the process, so you have to get all of this done inside of one attempt of that script… 5 or so minutes. Or, you can use ps to find the upgrade script running and kill it, then take your time.

Not saying anyone should do this. Vera support may direct you to do this, or something similar. A lot of different problems can look the same on the lights, but need different steps to cure them, so this may not be the cure for you. Vera support knows best, and if goes completely wrong, it’s on them. At that time, I was just starting a complete rebuild (clean slate, no backup restore–leave my problems behind) of my network to upgrade from a Vera3 to a Plus, and was already PO’d about the amount of work that would take, and having to buy a new device with no assurance that the problems I was having on the Vera3 would be resolved, and then completely out of my mind when the thing appeared to brick itself on the upgrade attempt right from step one. And then two days went by with no reply from Vera support. So I was red-faced and fully ready to just throw Vera in the dumper anyway. I had nothing to lose but my $99 (actually, I was still in the return window with Amazon, so I could have even decided to take that route if it hadn’t worked; yes, I was thinking like a bad person in the moment, don’t judge me :slight_smile: ).

#16

I feel I got lucky today. I pulled my second Vera Plus unit out of the box and set it up. Went smoothly without any problems. I feel very lucky.

#17

I?m back up and running. Old and new devices added back in, Static IP addy restored. (Didn?t have to remove the wall switch from the wall to pair it either. :slight_smile: )

#18

so its not truely bricked i thought i bricked mine a few times but u may have to try the factory reset a few times - that what eventually worked for me - i just kept on attmting a factory reset and eventually it came back up

#19

I just purchased what I presume is a new old stock veraplus to upgrade my vera edge. I thought it was a new brick although after a few hours and several incremental updates it looks like it is alive.

I will say from the user’s perspective, VERA could do a better job making it more clear what is going on. This veraplus was unresponsive for quite some time and there weren’t may prompts like “please wait”, I was pretty sure it was toast but after several updates and at least 2 hours, all seems fine.

If you happen to buy a new old stock VERA, plug it in, go to www.home.getvera.com (hopefully it will see you device, follow the prompts which will likely include a comment about updating and once the process starts, be patient and check on it every half hour or so. I did a reset or two which I’m not sure were necessary; I may have been a little impatient.