Why openHAB if I have Vera?

It’s not a cheeky question, just looking to understand why I would want openHAB if I have a Vera? Assuming I have support for all devices with the Vera, is this just an alternative? Don’t get me wrong, I love learning a new tool…just trying to figure out what this gets me that I don’t already have.

Everyone will have different answers for this but, for me, it was a few key items:

a) platform stability, and expand-ability (in my case, to help address stability)
b) a published roadmap for the future - one that’s open to public contribution.
c) a strong desire to see more than ~1-2 engineers working on evolving the core platform.
d) a focus on stability, performance & core-functionality over gloss (UI’s) - esp when their introduction breaks things repeatedly.
e) a community enabled to address platform deficiencies.

These were all as a result of using Vera since Vera 1/UI2 (c.2008). For my use-case, as a whole-home Automation (vs Home-Control), it never kept pace with my needs - so I needed some options to meet my goals.

Since stripping Vera (Vera 3/UI5 in my case) back to bare-bones Z-Wave & Alarm functionality, with no rules or automation, it’s been very stable - it’s basically a large remote-control, and it does that well.

Nest, Weather and all automation functions have been off-loaded to my openHAB deployment - which now runs Nest, Weather, Energy Monitoring, MQTT, & and as well as other services for granular Data capture & graphing (using influxDB & Grafana).

I get access to the full functionality of Vera/MiOS and the full catalog of services from openHAB, as well as the ability to run whatever other components I want to run (I use an Ubuntu VM to host everything these days)

Having said that, openHAB is not for everyone.

ATM, the most used version (OH 1.8.x) has a very steep learning curve and is very technical. They’re slowly building out OH 2.x, with a more point-and-click style interface, but it’s not ready for mass-consumption yet.

Thanks. I understand the long frustration with MCV, though I’ve managed to avoid direct experience with that (I am not a developer). Surprisingly, I have yet to outgrow my Vera…it’s more a matter of what do I want to tinker with next. Given the steep learning curve, I might wait for openHAB 2.0…though I do love a good puzzle.

Thanks for explaining it. The idea of an open source home automation platform is enticing. And a stable system with an evolving core platform and an empowered community is something that would be a welcome change from MCV.

If it wasn’t clear, OpenHab is another controller, just like Homeseer, Fibaro, or a host of others.

You basically make the Vera the Z-Wave driver, and use OpenHab as the “brains”.

You don’t need Vera with OpenHab, you can buy some other Z-Wave transmitter. But if you have a Vera already you might as well use it especially if you’re on the fence of OH and don’t want to buy another componant.

Actually, My Vera3 is very stable. I have to admit that I do not use z-wave devices, but a lot of other plugins.
The only reason that I still need openhab (which requires amost a daily reboot) is to integrate with my Nikobus domotics system (closed protocol).
If a plugin for Nikobus would exist, I could ditch my Openhab.

That’s odd, I never reboot openHAB and Vera still reboots (not just restart) daily. What OH Community thread are you hang to discuss/work through the openHAB issues you’re seeing?

@guessed: I am active on the forum. The problem is probabbly due to the Nikobus binding and the issue has been posted. problem is that only Davy (creator of the binding) knows the binding. He’s actually also not planning to migrate the binding to Openhab 2.
My vera runs perfect and has nice interfaces on IOS and Android. My wet dream would be someone porting the openhab Nikobus binding to a Vera plugin. I’m not a skilled programmer to do so.

@stefaanbolle, Took a quick look at your posting on the community there. Looks like most of your recent issues have been with either the Nikobus Binding, or with it’s cutover to running under OH2/Beta.

The latter seems to be a work in progress, as is OH 2.x in general

It’s always good to get to the bottom of any platform issues, since they’ll impact more people (and don’t require specialized hardware to debug)

Do you have a URL/link to the issues you’re experiencing with the core OH 1.x platform itself?

Hi to all

I just ordered a vera-plus coming from an openhab installation. OH is very powerful and has great community support. My main problem though is that every single bit of user application like a plain alarm system, scenes, etc have to be built from scratch involving sometimes a lot of effort especially for those not being so script oriented. At the other hand it is flexible and its expandability and scenarios are almost endless. I needed something that will have a solid front-end of-the-self features that I will not have to debug all the time. Security also is a great disadvantage since the OH core-engine does not allow user authentication and the cloud service is laggy at least…

Overall I like OH so my thinking is to combine both using the MIOS binding. I will keep my Wemo bulbs, arduinos on OH and I will transfer my front-end + zwave devices (except FGBS) to veraplus.

Does anyone has any idea if there is a way to transfer my zwave network from my Aeon z-stick to vera ?

thank you

You should be able to do a Z-Wave controller shift.
The Vera end of the operation is available from the Settings → ZWave menu.

But my experience with moving my Z-Wave network from a Vera 3 to a Vera Plus has not been very good.

Once I created a NEW Z-Wave network on the Vera Plus and excluded all of the devices for the old Z-Wave network and re-included them on the new Z-Wave network … Things have been quite stable.

@RTS - interesting, How did you create a new z-wave network in the same VP unit while the other was still active ? Was it a case of working through every device/node one by one ? Exclude one from old, include it onto new?