@tom_tom: I like the idea of automating as much as possible. Some evolved opinions below
Agreed that one can skip the manual step of defining the groups one is interested in, and instead do the opposite: disable those that one does not care about. HA’s semi-new integrations page makes that fairly simple: just filter on entities belonging to the (future) Helvar integration, and disable those that you don’t care about.
As for figuring out what (HA) entity each (Helvar) group represents, I’m torn… I suspect that most of the groups that one detects will represent lights. That said, I do have quite a few groups that contain (and control) blinds exclusively, as well as some others that contain (and control) relays exclusively. They don’t make any sense exposed as (HA) light entities, but rather as some other (HA native) entities. I guess one can loop over all the devices in a certain (Helvar) group, filter away any input modules, and then make an educated guess re. what the (Helvar) group represents? That’s just me thinking out loud, might miss something obvious here.
As for recalling (Helvar) scenes: what do you think about exposing an entity (or integration) service that allows you to do this?
Regardless of entity type we’ll choose for a certain group, it’s not obvious which scenes should be considered “on/off”, “up/down” etc. The Helvar documentation says:
1-12: On scenes
13: Automatic off (called by PIR)
14: Transition (minimum level) scene
15-16: Manual off (button press)
For an automatic configuration to just “work” out of the box, we’d need to select sane defaults (i.e two scenes). I’m personally using scene 1 and 15 more or less exclusively for all my groups - not sure how others have their systems set up.
Agreed on all your points, in fact I came to the same conclusion a few weeks back - they’re all implemented
The group → entity is hard. For now they’re all Lights. I make an attempt to decode device types, so we could try and work it out - but again, I don’t know what we’d go for. We really do need a better way of representing “remote scenes” in hass. Or perhaps an entity which is just a “scene picker”. The latter sounds easier.
Agreed that an entity services for scenes is the way to go. I’ll get on that once I’ve got the basics done.
I’ve got the group light on/off defaulting to scene 1/15 at the moment. Works ok - but is limiting, want to be able to select a scene.
A few improvements on functionality:
All loads appear (as lights for now) and can be controlled. I need to filter out device types more carefully.
Groups appear as lights and you can toggle between scene 1/15. Devices under those groups are then updated in the UI as their state changes (good to prove out that plumbing).
Lots more to do, of course - but it might be worth playing about now - it does actually do something (if you can get it to work!)
@tom_tom: Never in my life did I think I’d see Helvar spam - seems like a fairly niche market
I’ll try to make some time to give your implementation a spin in the coming days. I’ll likely need to make some minor changes (broadcast discovery won’t work as I’ve got the lighting system on its own VLAN), but that shouldn’t be too hard. Looking forward to see how it’s working in practice!
My requirement was to control other devices with DALI buttons so I wrote a quick script which matches ballast number and calls HA webservice to turn in on and off. But maybe someone is with better /elegant solution ?
I see there is Lunatone DALI-2 IoT Gateway which provides RESTFul intergration with DALI, maybe someone tried to use it?
@tom_tom Thank you for the aiohelvar! My goal is to use this as a “backup” for the maintenance guys so they can turn the lights from home if someone forgets. The site is quite large with a lot of units. So one new problem that occurred is this:
INFO:aiohelvar.router:Received the following command: ?V:2,C:164,G:[email protected]…
and in the middle of the string, this occurrs:
@1.74.2.13$?V:2,C:164,G:[email protected]
So, think I know how to solve tihs. In Router _send_command_task there is this:
@Raderarn - thanks! I’m pleased you managed to get that far!
Could well be that we’re not passing that correctly. If you’re so inclined, please do post a PR on the github repo, and I’ll check it out. Otherwise I’ll get to this at some point this winter.
Good morning guys, sorry for the intrusion. But I’m installing a Halvar Dali router in my house, I would like to be able to integrate it into Openhub or Home assistant, given the poor quality of its dedicated application. Further developments have been made, there is another group that I cannot find. Thank you for your reply.
I’m not smart enough to run the aiohelvar python thing, so I’m hoping for something that can run directly inside HASS/HACS. I’m well versed in the Helvar world, aside from HelvarNET, so I can beta test the integration if needed.
Our hardware supports Apple HomeKit and can this way be integrated into Home Assistant. You could either use our KNX Bridge or SmartCore, both have a dedicated native DALI Port. We can control dimmable and tuneable white DALI lights for now, each individually addressable from 0-63. Broadcast is also supported and of course we synchronise the status both ways in case you have other DALI controllers such as keypads or rotary dimmers. Supporting further types, such as RGB(CW) lights, motion detectors, brightness and temperature sensors are coming soon. We also demonstrated a working Proof of Concept for Matter at ISE in Barcelona a few weeks ago, so a free update to Matter will come as well. Longterm (3-6 months) we are also thinking about supporting Home Assistant natively without bridging via HomeKit or Matter.
This is more or less a competitor to Helvar, without, as far as I can tell, a local API. So the only way of controlling via Home Assistant, will be to use one of the big tech cloud based systems – exactly what we’re trying to avoid.
I should add that the high CHF makes all these products very expensive outside of Switzerland. More expensive than Helvar! And that is saying something.
I bought the Lunatone DALI-2 IoT Gateway hoping to use it with my Helvar installation with 2 910 routers, but so far it hasn’t been great.
Any change to groups or individual lights are quickly reversed by the Helvar routers.
If I scan the subnet from the Gateway all hell breaks loose, with dimmers losing their settings, and all sorts of weird problems. Funnily enough the scan worked without causing issues on a different subnet, but the Helvar routers still reversed all changes quickly.
I’ve contacted Lunatone to hopefully get some pointers or answer definitively if it’s incompatible with the Helvar routers.
Sorry to open this thread again but the integration are only picking up the groups, noen of the lights. This is probably something to do with the aiohelvar as this is showing the same behaviour.
If you want together with a friend I have found an excellent solution. It’s been working for two months now. Helvar Router 905 - Node Red - Home assistant
this winter.