Hello, everyone.
What’s the most unique/cool/fun/interesting thing you’ve done with your Vera system?
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And please note that we’d like to use the responses in marketing materials.
Thank you so much.
Many, many things but the most recent is that I developed a multi-zone dimmable landscape lighting system so I could “tune” the light-level by landscape feature (e.g. high-intensity for flag, low intensity for palms and medium intensity for path lighting). My wife loves it when I say, "Hey Siri, let’s star gaze and the Vera turns off the oceanside palm uplighting so we can stare at the stars and watch satellites. I used off-the-shelf components and can provide more project details for those who might be interested.
Mmmmm. cable pr0n… noice!
Goefencing was the coolest for me. If it was reliable, I’d use it for a lot more things (so fingers crossed for the next firmware)
Using it to drive my Volumio player in the bedroom as a nice, increasing volume wakeup is great too. It’s just a pain to change the schedule on a week by week.
C
Interconnect vera with Alexa and command my roller shutter with the voice.
Landscape and special outdoor lighting ala @blacey. All the landscape lighting is low-voltage 12 VAC with LED lamps, so even with 27 fixtures the load is ~45W. It’s controlled by a Z-wave plug-in switch.
We’ve built an outdoor Tiki bar with lots of fun special effects lighting. This is mostly LED, some 120 VAC powered, but mostly 12 VDC. The DC LEDS are driven from the 12 VAC low-voltage landscape power via a sealed 9 - 36 VAC to 12 VDC converter, which powers a 12 VDC “router mini-UPS,” which in turn powers a Wi-Fi RGBW LED driver. The red LED deck and stair lights, and LED strings in the landscaping, are controlled by this device. I use the Magic Home Wi-Fi plug-in from @ceefin to control the RGBW device.
The AC stuff in the Tiki bar is powered from a Zooz Z-Wave outlet strip which also has USB ports for charging a phone or tablet. We stream Bluetooth to the Tiki Bar stereo and it’s nice to have the phone charging at the same time.
I built an outdoor box similar to @blacey’s but don’t have pictures. I’ve attached a picture of the Tiki bar in operation, the deck lights, and the Vera control panel for both areas.
Sorin, thanks for the fun question!
Too many, but some are.
And this is without what is running on a PI with openLuup and only in the house. Starting to look at the gardens now (optimized plant watering is on top of that list).
Possibilities are almost endless, you can use it to have some serious savings on your energy bill (for me about 10%), but they do need quite a bit of time. Especially in fine tuning and if you end up publishing some of your plugins.
Cheers Rene
wow, thank you so much, guys.
awesome use cases, keep them coming.
It really helps us observing how customers are using their Vera units.
Too many to list here but I will provide some. Note also that I am using the vera now only as a device bridge and completely disconnected from mios servers (no mios mobile apps either) and all my automation is run from openLuup on a VM on my NAS.
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I got mine to properly record energy monitoring data and use geo-fencing for an entire 48 hours . Believe me that is an accomplishment.
I’m afraid I don’t believe you 
C
Saving money is usually the driver for me to really open up and write custom/unique code. With that said, here’s mine:
HVAC: I have a whole house fan and live in an area with a Delta breeze that kicks in around 9pm. This can cause the temp to drop significantly within an hour or so I’ve written code to shutdown the A/C and kick on the house fan to suck in cool air when needed and it makes sense. Still contemplating buying the window opener actuators to finish this setup (pricey and not real confident in Vera). Either way it has still saved me a bunch of money. Also, with all the motion, ping, geofence sensors I can reliably and automatically know when the HVAC should be on or not.
Pool: Probably my second most expensive appliance. With the help of the Autelis plugin RSTROUSE created, I can utilize some complex logic (by month, schedule, weather, mode) how to set my pool temp/color/circulation.
Security: I converted my alarm system to DSC and with the help of the DSC plugin, utilize all the door sensors within Vera. I live in a nice neighborhood surrounded by cops, FBI, parole officers, etc. I really don’t need a monitored alarm system if I can set off the external alarm remotely and get texted any issues, all using Vera. I still have the ability to isolate the alarm in it’s own loop too just in case Vera becomes unreliable.
I do all the other stuff too, but these are the 3 areas I spend most of my time doing custom work on. I follow the rule that home automation should be natural/automatic and not require me to tell it what it should be doing. I try to stick to this hands-off approach unless multiple human opinions get involved (i.e. the wife).
I’m not sure how unique it is at this point, but I turned 2 VeraSecure’s into functional security systems so they now function like they were marketed to.
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,50540.0.html
That was my one-hit wonder 
I can confirm that the savings can be quite good. I implemented multizone heating without any fancy equipment, using 3 on/off thermostats (they use PID for fine control but that gets messed up too when used in parallel) and a bunch of Z-Wave radiator valves. Now that unoccupied rooms are no longer heated, we save around 25% on our gas bill without any loss in comfort or convenience.
Automated irrigation is a good time saver; Vera takes care of most parts of the garden and the greenhouse, using moisture sensors to estimate the amount of water needed. Not easy to fine-tune, but once it works it saves a bit of effort during the summer months. The system can work off the water mains or an underground rain water reservoir; the pumps are controlled by regular Z-Wave switches while the ball valves controlling the water flow are managed by OpenSprinkler and its Vera plugin.
For security, I installed sensors in the bolt wells of all doors (as well as in our safe), so Vera knows if each door is actually locked. When we hit the “go to bed” or “leave house” button, Vera warns us if any door is not locked. When we come home at night, the lights go on automatically as soon as we unlock the door (I chose not to use geofencing for this).
Maybe I’m forgetting some other minor things.
I still have to integrate our cooling system (I’ll start shortly). it’s like having a (second) full time job
I tied Vera into Google Home via IFTT and have a command “Activate system shutdown” which will power off every connected device that is on in the house, TV’s, lights, AV receiver, etc… This in itself is not to out of the ordinary but I also incorporated device exemptions to the shutdown. For example if I want to keep on the living room TV and computer I can give a voice command e.g. “Hold living room TV”, Hold Computer" and after giving the voice command “Activate system shutdown” held devices will remain on. The inverse of hold is release. I also have certain lights that go on between sunset and midnight. These lights are automatically exempt from the system shutdown while the scene is active however this can be overridden by initiating a voice command “Activate sunset override”.
One thing that we’ve learned is that our users’ imagination has no limits 
Thanks, everyone.
whoah, long time no see. I love the breath of fresh air around here.
Well, let’s see.
I’ve easily automated my door bell and mail box with two fibaro fgk contact sensors.
The doorbell: Since at the time I wanted to do this Doorbells were somehow expensive + cloud dependent and fees, I wanted something accessible and easy to do without existing door bell pre-wiring because my property limit is at about 5 meters from the front door behind a gate. I wanted the doorbell at the gate. - I simply took one of these sensors (should work with any contact sensor) and tied the two contact wires to a $2 dumb door bell button. Simple and works like a charm - Whenever someone presses the doorbell button I get a notification that someone is at the gate and my Hikvision camera also makes a snapshot or short video. I don’t have the full convenience of a device such as Nest door bell but hey, it only costs about $20 for the sensor.
The mailbox: Same thing as the doorbell, used a similar contact sensor with the two wires, one connected to the flap of the mail box and other connected to the body of the mailbox. Whenever I get something in the mailbox, the flap will open the circuit for the sensor and sending me a notification that have mail.
I’d love to do more but I don’t have as much time to tinker as I would want. All these basic automations have been working since setup more than a year ago. I’m only using the web interface or app whenever I want to setup something new or maybe something break, which fortunately didn’t.
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