Vera Z-Wave integration

Are there plans to integrate Rachio with Vera (Z-Wave)? There are a lot of us out there who use Vera to control our homes so controlling our sprinklers is a natural extension of Vera. Any plans?

If they don’t have a cloud --> cloud integration, no current plans to support Z-Wave.

:cheers:

I have a razberry and started on a http driver…the deeper I got into it, the more I realized that zwave protocol doesn’t make much sense for an irrigation controller. The protocol will handle it but when you consider the interview process of a zwave device, it becomes more difficult to define the behavior of a device that may or may not have anything connected to any of the binary switches that it would emulate. Now if you wanted to build an irrigation controller using zwave, that makes more sense as you will be defining discreet devices for each valve and you can use sensor polling to emulate flow sensor behavior. I was heading down this route until I realized that smart irrigation controllers were going mainstream.

Very possible for rachio to do this but it will have warts. Much like zwave garage door systems, if you have looked at those, those too don’t fit the zwave spec very well and required custom hardware to hide the warts.

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I would love to see this as well. However, it would probably make more sense to go the API route in order to connect with some of the more popular zwave ecosystems such as vera, smarthings, openhab.

It can’t happen with the current rev. Zwave devices need a very specific radio onboard.

If I can control nest with my Vera controller there’s no reason why it can’t be done with Rachio.
Vera plug/in would periodically access Rachio portal for status updates and to trigger basic operations.

That is a tcp bridge, nest does not have a zwave radio in it. Vera supplies the Plugin (I think). Personally I want rachio working on their next gen instead. This will all work itself out with HomeKit.

Vera doesn’t really develop that I believe it’s accomplished by the community ?! Not sure

Yea that could be the case

Hey @franz Vera absolutely supports cloud-to-cloud devices, and someone actually made a fantastic integration application for Nest in the past few months.

List of all “works with vera” devices: http://getvera.com/compatibility/
Example of Cloud-to-Cloud device: http://getvera.com/portfolio-posts/nest-learning-thermostat/
Discussion forum on the LUA Nest plugin: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=34478.0

Hopefully this opens the door to more custom applications. Nest works really nicely, creating various devices. Since that’s how integration usually appears (UI is basically reduced to various individual device types), it would probably make sense here to simply create multiple binary switches for each zone, a water meter, and perhaps even some sensors based on external peripherals.

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I would also encourage Rachio to create a plugin for Vera. It is the current thing preventing me from migrating to Rachio and the Vera community is large which would be an opportunity for Rachio to reach out to more home automation enthusiast. Win/Win for all involved.

Thanks everyone. We’ll take a look at Vera. Have a great weekend!

Any updates on Vera? Lack of Vera support is the only thing holding me back from buying a Rachio

Add me to the list of people who would absolutely love native Z-Wave+ support (not Vera specifically). Right now I have HomeSeer 3 Pro for home automation and use a plug-in to connect to the Rachio services with my API access token. The ability to connect directly and do simple things such as read zone status and issue on/off commands would be a big win. I completely understand the added benefits of the cloud services, but sometimes you just want down and dirty direct access to see what’s going on without relying on additional services.

As there is no Z-Wave radio in current Rachio Controllers, native Z-Wave connectivity is not possible.

That said, if there’s plugin for HomeSeer, why not one for Vera?

@Sammy2, I was referencing a native Z-Wave+ radio as something I’d like to see in a v3/v4.

The HomeSeer plug-in named UltraRachio3 is written by a third-party, not by HomeSeer or Rachio directly and uses the unique API access token each of our accounts have.

I’m sorry. I meant to actually say that it could be a feature request for future models in my comment but didn’t. That said, I don’t think I’ll pay again just to add it via Z-Wave into my HA system. I would however pay for an app to do that, a one time payment and not a subscription fee though.

Do you have a link to the HomeSeer Plugin code? It might be something to incorporate into Vera with some minor code changes. TIA.

I agree it may not be the one feature to make me upgrade when already on a G2 model, but it would help. :slight_smile:

The plug-in is not open source so I suspect the code isn’t out there.

Maybe the author would be interested in doing something for Vera, below is the support forum for the HS3 plug-in.

https://forums.homeseer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1506