We’ve moved and I’m just beginning the painful process of re-automating our lives. We had a pretty complicated system set up on vera in our last home (300+ devices) and had gotten it to the point where it mainly just worked and required minimal maintenance.
So now that I’m starting fresh, I’m wondering if we’re better off buying a brand new vera and resetting/reprogramming all of the devices we were able to take with us or using our old vera and just renaming devices and deleting things we no longer have/don’t use.
While I’m dreading trying to figure out again how to set up some of the apps, from what I’ve read deleting things never truly deletes them and we might be better off starting anew. Given that the vera itself is one of the cheaper components, I’m willing to invest the additional $ to have a smoother running system.
"We had a pretty complicated system … where it mainly just worked and required minimal maintenance."
If your current box is running UI7 I would keep it since you mention it’s already tweaked for solid performance, and that shouldn’t change for any devices / luup that you leave on it. But if you’re coming from Edge or lower and looking for performance improvement I definitely recommend a new box.
This is a hot topic for me right now, as I only just started with UI7 two weeks ago on a VeraSecure. My 4-year old Vera3 on UI5 is rock-solid and continues as my main controller, but at this point I’ve collected way too many z-wave+ devices that I just couldn’t use. The thought of migrating all of my devices over gives me a headache, so I am definitely running both in parallel for while (thank you wget).
FWIW, first reactions to UI7 were “meh”, followed by confusion, followed by disgust, followed by discovery and now I am quite impressed. Yeah, it’s a bit buggy idiosyncratic but some of the plugins I am discovering that were previously unavailable to me on UI5 are amazing (virtual panel, reactor).
And you can definitely feel the available CPU cycles on the VeraSecure. Keypad to scene on VeraSecure → wget to vera3 direct to device is a lot faster than a native scene on the Vera3 for that same device.
[quote=“Big Moose, post:2, topic:199877”]"We had a pretty complicated system … where it mainly just worked and required minimal maintenance."
If your current box is running UI7 I would keep it since you mention it’s already tweaked for solid performance, and that shouldn’t change for any devices / luup that you leave on it. But if you’re coming from Edge or lower and looking for performance improvement I definitely recommend a new box.
This is a hot topic for me right now, as I only just started with UI7 two weeks ago on a VeraSecure. My 4-year old Vera3 on UI5 is rock-solid and continues as my main controller, but at this point I’ve collected way too many z-wave+ devices that I just couldn’t use. The thought of migrating all of my devices over gives me a headache, so I am definitely running both in parallel for while (thank you wget).[/quote]
Just so I’m clear–the z-wave + devices you can only use on the newer UI? It’s been so long since I fiddled with our system, I can’t remember… We had an older controller bridged to a second controller and a new one which communicated with the master, all on the same system and running under UI7. I can’t recall the exact reason it was so complicated, but it was working, so I didn’t want to mess with it! I did like UI7 after I got used to it.
In our new place, I want to go with the KISS principle and don’t anticipate making things quite so complicated (hopefully). I had a LOT of apps installed that we just didn’t use.
My concern is that I recall reports of memory issues with some of the h/w and as you start to get into large #s of devices that can be a problem, especially if you’re using h/w that is still full of legacy devices and apps from an old system.
Just so I'm clear--the z-wave + devices you can only use on the newer UI?
In short, yes. AFAIK the last widely available FW release for UI5 was 1.5.622 with no zwave+ support.
However, Vera subsequently made available a stopgap FW release 1.5.672 to allow limited functionality for some (very few) older zwave+ devices on UI5. This is what I have been running for a few years and it has allowed devices such as the Aeotech RGBW bulb to pair and function, even though UI5 hardware doesn’t have the prerequisite zwave+ chipset.
Given the convoluted nature of your old setup, I would start from scratch with wiped or new hardware. You mentioned 3 boxes in your setup, what model is the newest box of the bunch?
Best Home Automation shopping experience. Shop at Ezlo!