[ANSWERED]Faraway Locks: Bridging Vera Controllers, Using Ve

Posted on
Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:14 pm
gadgetnut offline
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[ANSWERED]Faraway Locks: Bridging Vera Controllers, Using Ve

ON EDIT: Sometimes it takes starting a thread to resolve things. One of my slave Vera 3 controllers was locked up and not making connection to the Master. So now Indigo is controlling all faraway locks effectively via the Vera Bridge.

(Matt and Jay, feel free to delete this post if you prefer... on the other hand, and I realize it is fairly costly to use several Vera controllers to accomplish this... but I imagine others may wonder how to control distant locks without a Z-Wave infrastructure!)



Hi, everyone. Thank you for your patience to read through this, it's a bit convoluted, but I hope the info might help others as well.

My current project includes controlling several Z-Wave locks from Indigo via the Vera Bridge to a Vera 3 controller. The challenge is it is a very large home, we're using all Insteon, no Z-Wave other than four Z-Wave locks a couple hundred feet apart.

Over on the Micasa Verde forums I started a thread about extending a Z-Wave network to far flung locks if you don't have any Z-Wave devices. Folks referred me to Beaming-capable Z-Wave devices such as lamp modules, AC plugs and Aeon Labs Z-Wave repeaters to extend Z-Wave network via hopping (up to four hops permitted and last device must be Beaming-capable.) Long story short, none of those worked to allow one Vera 3 controller to reach locks across the house.

My next plan was to "bridge" multiple Vera 3 controllers together via ethernet, such that each Vera 3 is installed close by and within direct radio range of its Z-Wave lock. Then you select a "master" Vera and you add Devices (Devices>Add Devices>UPnP, check the "Scan for UPnP Devices box, then wait ten minutes for them to populate) from the secondary and tertiary Vera 3 controllers. The Z-Wave locks from the slave Vera 3s were immediately added as Devices on the master Vera 3. From the single master Vera 3 GUI in Mac OS X, or from one login page in HomeWave on iOS, I log into a single server and can control Z-Wave locks hundreds of feet apart with no Z-Wave network in the house. Great.

Now I'm trying to get Indigo to control these locks. In Indigo I set up the Vera Server using the master Vera 3 controller and in Indigo>New Device>Define and Sync all the locks all appear in the drop down list.

When I try to control the lock in Indigo I get the following Vera Bridge errors. Do you think Indigo needs to see the actual Vera 3 controller (slave) controlling the distant locks?

Any suggestions? Thanks very much.

[PLEASE NOTE THIS ISSUE WAS RESOLVED, see beginning of this post.]

Vera Bridge Error vera thread: send command error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "veralib.py", line 234, in _executeUrl
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
return _opener.open(url, data)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 381, in open
response = self._open(req, data)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 399, in _open
'_open', req)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 360, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 1118, in http_open
return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/urllib2.py", line 1093, in do_open
raise URLError(err)
URLError: <urlopen error (61, 'Connection refused')>

Posted on
Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:46 pm
jay (support) offline
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Re: Faraway Locks: Bridging Vera Controllers, Using Vera Bri

As you discovered, when a Vera is locked up you may see that "connection refused" error. I've marked this thread answered.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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