Hunter Douglas PowerView control with Vera and Amazon Echo

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

BINGO!! Thanks so much! The test run ran perfectly. The shades came down perfectly in sequence. I'll expand to code to include all 8 of the shades.

One further question - in doing my search for this ability, I ran into a number of comments about internal timers and having Vera reset itself and lose the timing of a currently running scene. Would that be an issue here if I was to have a time span of say an hour from start to end? My southern shades open up at about 20 minutes after sunrise, but my eastern shades, because of a solar obstruction, need to open about an hour later. Do I run the risk of Vera loosing track of where it is in the sequence?

Thanks again!

[mike Q]

Cool.  Glad it worked. 

The only time you need to worry about Vera resetting on delays is with Sleep() and I believe Wait().  These are blocking events and will cause Vera to think your luua code caused something to go off in the weeds.

call_delay spawns a worker thread and is not blocking the luua engine from execution.

In short, no, you don't need to worry about Vera resetting.

Take Care,

Mike

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

I've started to replace all the individual shade scenes with "master" scenes. I'm now having difficulty deactivating the old scenes - getting "Failed to save system configuration" error from Vera. Not sure what that's about, but I'll do my research on the forum and come up with a solution. Don't want to "wear out my welcome" with you.

Thanks again Mike

[mike Q]

I have a VeraLite running UI5 and a VeraPlus that is in the box.  I tried upgrading to UI7 and transferring over to the VeraPlus and so much was broken I just gave up on the VeraPlus.

One of the issues that made me give up on UI7/VeraPlus is the "Failed to save system configuration".   Apparently the LUUA parser on UI7 is buggy and there's a bunch of characters that you cannot have in your LUUA code or it causes the parser to choke.

Are you on VeraPlus or UI7?

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

Mike - I'm running a VeraPLus and UI17. (had a WINK, but abandoned it because of it's cloud scene execution)

I discovered that if I change the lines in the luup code in the particular scene I want to disable to all comments (adding the "--" in front of the code lines), I am now able to disable the scenes. Go figure!

I'm keeping the disabled Window Shade scenes in Vera until I feel comfortable that the delay code is going to be stable, probably a week.  Any idea of how I can check the amount of unused memory I've got in VP?

[mikeah007]

Yes I am interested. How is it done?

[mike Q]

If you SSH into your Vera, you can check the amount of memory with the "free" command.

@XA44Owq26HxCq88   Does commenting out the code fix the "unable to save configuration" issue?  If so, it sounds like the parser error I mentioned.  There's something in the LUUA code that UI7 is not happy with.  I ran into this when I tried to upgrade.

[mike Q]

If you SSH into your Vera, you can check the amount of memory with the "free" command.

@XA44Owq26HxCq88   Does commenting out the code fix the "unable to save configuration" issue?  If so, it sounds like the parser error I mentioned.  There's something in the LUUA code that UI7 is not happy with.  I ran into this when I tried to upgrade.

Look at post #4 in this thread.  It explains how to get the scene info from the PowerView hub and how to write Luua code to execute those scenes from Vera.

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

MikeQ, not sure what your reference to message 4 means. I've got the code to access the HD hub scenes working properly

Anyway, with the outside temp finally going above my set point, the scene apparently worked and it DID NOT close the East shades as it is supposed to do.

Not sure if it's related, but later in the day, when the East shades were supposed to close (2 hours before sunset), they did NOT close. Strange. The rest of the scene LUUP code worked properly with all the other shades closing at their proper time, hence the code actually ran through the various delays  (luup.call_delay("CloseBlindWithDelay) over a 2 hour period.

Is there any chance that one LUUP code in one scene could be affecting another LUUP code in another scene? I've seen hints of that possibility when my errant shade (not the E Shades) gets closed when I modify and save any of my scenes that have LUUP code in them.

We'll see what happens this afternoon.

I've got Vera Support involved and they will be doing a check on my unit at some point.

thanks again.

[mike Q]

MikeQ, not sure what your reference to message 4 means. I've got the code to access the HD hub scenes working properly

Anyway, with the outside temp finally going above my set point, the scene apparently worked and it DID NOT close the East shades as it is supposed to do.

Not sure if it's related, but later in the day, when the East shades were supposed to close (2 hours before sunset), they did NOT close. Strange. The rest of the scene LUUP code worked properly with all the other shades closing at their proper time, hence the code actually ran through the various delays  (luup.call_delay("CloseBlindWithDelay) over a 2 hour period.

Is there any chance that one LUUP code in one scene could be affecting another LUUP code in another scene? I've seen hints of that possibility when my errant shade (not the E Shades) gets closed when I modify and save any of my scenes that have LUUP code in them.

We'll see what happens this afternoon.

I've got Vera Support involved and they will be doing a check on my unit at some point.

thanks again.

The #4 reference was to mikeah007.  He was asking how to automate his shades.

Strange.  I can't imagine it's the code.  Perhaps the vera is in the middle of doing something when the timer expires and it misses the event?  Looking at the logs when the delays fire might help.   

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

Just an update -

My E Shades operated properly yesterday. They DID NOT close at noon when the temp was above the set point (30 deg). They DID close later in the day as part of their normal closing sequence.

I attribute this to what appears to me as a typical Vera response to scene modifications - Wait 24 hours so everything settles down and then look at the performance. This makes troubleshooting a long process!

I'll investigate how to see the logs. That would help.

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

Mike Q,

Finally got my conditional temp code working. I've had some other difficulties with my HD Hub I believe. It won't run a HD scene based on sunset or sunrise. Other issues, like shades needing power cycling, etc. have continued. I've been in touch with the HD tech people who have helped, but are stymied by my various issues.

To make a long story short, I've replaced the HD Hub with a new one, reprogrammed the whole setup, rewrote all my vera code to reflect the new scene numbers. All seems to be working, but I haven't gone through a whole 24 hour cycle yet.

I did experience one hickup, two shades in one HD scene stopped responding and needed re-calibration via the HD App before they worked again.

My question to you is - have you found any clever way of having vera, via LUUA code, send a re-calibration command to a specific HD Shade? I could build that into a scene that runs once a day, just to insure that the shades don't go off line while I'm away.

thanks

PS - When I speak to the HD tech, I'll see if he can shed any light on the issue and the potential command that would do the re-calibration and share what I find out here.

[mike Q]

Don't know of any way to do a re-calibrate from Vera but I'm sure it's possible.  Since it can be triggered from the app, there must be an HTTP interface for it.

It will be interesting to know if HD will share the URL api with you.

BTW, I stumbled upon a way to backup the HD hub in the event you lose your configuration or it gets corrupted.  It's in the menu options of the app but not very obvious.

When you bring up the app, click on the 3 horizontal bars in the upper left corner.

From there select "Hunter Douglas Blinds" then click on the first (and probably only) selection.   Next you will see a menu with "Hub Name", "Network Info" and "Hub Backup".

[XA44Owq26HxCq88]

On the backup thing, more importantly, you are able to email a copy of the json file to yourself for safe storage in case the phone goes kapluey.

I've examined the contents of that file, but other than a few identifiable words, roomVectors,  shadeVectors, etc. it's all gibberish to me.

BTW, no problems overnight with the shades. I'll see how they perform thru the day.

[blindman75]

http://youtu.be/ywuBRNFwOHQ

I can share the details if anyone is interested.

Not really hard.  I use the Amazon Echo / Vera bridge to trigger scenes on Vera.  Those scenes just use the URL interface of the Hunter Douglas PowerView hub.

I am a Hunter Douglas dealer. There are changes coming to Powerview later this year. We will be getting a new hub that will work directly with Amazon Echo  and Alexa devices and integrate easier with HA systems.

Sent from my SM-G925V using Tapatalk