Happy to Share My New Home Assistant App: ViLocal / Local integration of Viessmann ViCare thermostats and climate sensors into Home Assistant

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Hey, first time's a charm! :slight_smile: Today I released my first Home Assistant App into the wild! Yay! ViLocal, the Home Assistant App version! :+1:

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ViLocal has been around for some time. It provides the possibility to add Viessmann ViCare smart thermostats and climate sensors to Home Assistant and that without requring any connection to the internet and / or (paid) API access by Viessmann. So far neither the official Viessmann integration, nor any of their APIs provide access ot the thermostat or climate sensor data. ViLocal sniffs the Viessmann network and makes the data available in Home Assistant.

The main downside: In order to sniff the ZigBee network, you will need a own ZigBee dongle, e.g. an SMLight dongle. Re-using the same dongle that you already use for example for ZigBee2MQTT will not work unfortuantely. So a minor invest is necesarry to enable ViLocal.

Now I decided to make it even easier to integrate ViLocal into Home Assistant, by creating an own app for it! Previously it was quite cumbersome, as one needed to install ViLocal on a spare RaspberryPi or a VM of some sort. Now, the app can be installed right into Home Assistant and data is send via the local MQTT broker (e.g. Mosquitto), using HA Device Discovery to expose all kinds of sensors & other information from the thermostats and climate sensors.

For now ViLocal only supports reading data from the thermostats. I have a working PoC for local thermostat control, but it still requires a ton of tinkering to get it somehow stable. So stay tuned! :slight_smile: I know that this is one of the most requested features for my project.

Feel free to check out ViLocal, as well as my new ViLocal Home Assistant App. Happy hearing from you with any feedback, suggestions and / or pull requests to my projects. Have fun tinkering! :wrapped_gift:

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Perfect timing. A property manager I know highly recommended Viessmann propane boilers for a replacement I'm looking at doing. Of course my first thought was "does it work with HA?" I already have (Honeywell) thermostats; it's just the boiler I'd want to monitor.

I'm not thrilled with the idea of another vendor cloud-dependent solution, so the idea of something local piqued my interest. Does this only work with thermostats, or could I use it for something like a Viessman boiler?

Also, you mention MQTT. Again, something I don't use. Is that required?

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Hey @CaptTom, unfortunately Viessmann is not the easiest "infrastructure" to work with. They are great from a hardware point of view, robust & everything, but when it comes to the topic of cross-integration, APIs and etc., they are quite locked-in and provide (if at all) proprietary solutions mainly or not at all. Which is a huge bummer in the modern age of home automation.

This even shows within their own eco-system. So on the one hand side they have "ViCare", their home appliance section (thermostats, climate sensors, etc.), which is using essentially ZigBee, with some vendor specific attributes and stuff. This is what ViLocal and my new Home Assistant app can monitor.

For all of their boilers, heat pumps and other "installed appliances", they are not using ZigBee, but their own protocol based on IR, called "Optolink". This is why, in order to connect ViCare, you need a special device called a "VitoConnect", that is essentially a 3-way-bridge, between Optolink, WiFi and ZigBee for ViCare. But again, no possibility to inject the data stream of your heating system into HA unfortunately.

Luckily I (and also others in that regards :slight_smile: ) got you covered ages ago! For monitoring your Optolink stream from your heating system, you can use my other project called the Optolink Bridge or a longer runing sister project called Optolink Splitter. Downside: For this one no HA App is possible, because you need dedicated USB Hardware (a USB-to-TTL adapter) to connect to your heating system. Essentially both project act like a "man in the middle" and intercept the Optolink stream, to then publish it to (again) MQTT / Home Assistant.

Now in order to monitor your full Viessmann solution, unfortunately you will need both solutions: ViLocal for monitoring your thermostats, climate sensors, etc. and Optolink Bridge or Splitter to monitor your heating system. This is also my setup:

The heating system feeds into Optolink Bridge, which forwards the data to VitoConnect. VitoConnect then deals with ViCare components, which my ViLocal project monitors.

I would say the general rule of thumb is: In case you decide to go with both ViCare + Optolink, my bridge is a better fit (as it is designed for working with both), Optolink Splitter on the other hand can also work without ViCare / a VitoConnect, but is a little worse from an optimization point of view, if used with an Vitoconnect.

Hope this gave you a brief introduction into the proprietary world of Viessmann! Happy tinkering and feel free to get back to me with any questions about any of my projects! Happy to help! :+1:

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I'm completely confused. Is this an App or a Custom Integration, or both, or neither?

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@Sir_Goodenough it is an App (aka Add-On), no Custom Integration needed, as the devices & entities are published via MQTT Discovery to your Home Assistant instance. :+1:

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Normally I would expect to see some installation instructions. I cannot find this. Can you send me a link to them?

UPDATE, never mind. I found it
If I may suggest to make the link a little more visible, I missed it a couple of times.

(Maybe even add an HA MyLink here or in the readme to help hilight it.)

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Glad you found it! Sure, I myself found it kind of confusing that when developing an app for HA, you essentially have three different kinds of readme files:

The README.md of the repo.: ViLocal-ha_app/README.md at main · kristian/ViLocal-ha_app · GitHub

The README.md of the app itself: ViLocal-ha_app/vilocal/README.md at 4c1ace63eb157a6616d54291b80def0590466ca4 · kristian/ViLocal-ha_app · GitHub

As well as the DOCS.md displayed in the documentation tab in HA: ViLocal-ha_app/vilocal/DOCS.md at 4c1ace63eb157a6616d54291b80def0590466ca4 · kristian/ViLocal-ha_app · GitHub

Which one did you find first in particular? :slight_smile: Happy to add a link to any of those, to maie it easier to catch!

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I went to the first link, didn't find anyrhing.

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I went to the 2nd link, didn't see it.

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Then on the second link I saw the link to Documentation...

Personally
I suggest adding a link one or more places using https://my.home-assistant.io/create-link/ And I don't care about the rest of the formatting.

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Thanks for the suggestion @Sir_Goodenough! I improved the documentation. :slight_smile:

I hope that makes it more clear & visible:

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