I am starting this thread to get feedback for the development if the interface for the Lutron Caseta Pro Hub. I have been using Lutron Caseta light dimmers and Pico remotes now for over a year with the Staples Connect. it is an abject shame that that product (built by D-Link) has been abandoned. Only Wink seems to have control although I thing Vera has an interface too. Wink is too slugging and you all know requires the cloud, which is why you are here. Also Wink appears to not understand the power to the Pico remote.
I have the component interface functioning and now in work on devices. I am going to only support the Lutron Caseta dimmer (wall or plugin) and the Pico remote. There is a shade control but I do not have a shade so I am reluctant to add code for a device I cannot test.
The Pico remote is the magic of what Lutron offers. This is a phenomenal little device that has so much capability if only someone would utilize all of it’s features. I am trying to accomplish this. Currently I am going to label each of the five buttons (on, off, favorite, dim_up, dim_down) but the device handler will detect button_down and button_up. From button_up the user will be able to generate a turn_on, turn_of, or toggle. from button_down, user can start a dimming or any variable increment or detriment of any device (tempurature, fan speed, light intensity, etc.
The light is pretty basic in that you can set and read intensity (0-100) in very tiny increments of 0.01 which is really what the Lutron interface allows.
I will give progress of the development here instead of the previous locations (links set up). Please give me feedback or ideas here if you have actually used or have these Lutron Caseta devices.
I would love to help you test your code if you’re willing. I have the Smart Bridge Pro Hub and have played around with the telnet interface via terminal. I’ve also used the caseta system for about a year in conjunction with various other platforms: vera, Wink-mqtt (rooted) and Homeseer. I would have kept using Homeseer but it always felt clunky and hard to work with and I would prefer direct interfacing with Lutron instead of going through wink.
I have several pico remotes, in wall dimmers and the dimming plug module. From what I’ve read the pug module acts very much like an in wall dimmer so there shouldn’t be an issue there.
I agree with you on the Pico remotes. With my Homeseer setup I was able to use them as scene controllers but they never seemed to dim anything correctly. That would be great to get working.
I know that the telnet controls let you control the duration of it takes to dim (ie take 30 seconds to dim from 100% to 0%) Are you planning to incorporate that feature?
I hadn’t played around with any of the SBPH features. My intent was to use the raw device data and incorperate the features directly in HA. The reason is to allow the Pico to dim a GE light dimmer.
I converted over from my own homegrown system to hass over the last week or so and due to the lack of Lutron integration I’ve spent some time making my own component and platform. It’s in no state for me to make a pull request yet though so I’d be happy to help you test your module if you want. I have wall switches in addition to dimmers so I’d like to see those supported as well, essentially they behave as dimmers except the only valid OUTPUT values are 0 and 100. I’d also like to see the dimming duration feature supported as mentioned above by @tschnepf.
I am a beginner with Python, being a C, C++, and assembly engineer for most of my life. I have also had much trouble in navigating the design of HA and have tried multiple ways to get the monitor thread to work correctly. I would appreciate much help in filling in the device handling details. I am recovering from surgery and have had struggles with that as well and I have been working with this for weeks and am starting to get frustrated.
I intended to use a json file, much the same as that which you can download from the hub" to store the information and I wanted to use automatic discovery of devices when they appear and are not in the json hash as stored internally. I have not written that code yet nor do I have devices working.
I would appreciate much help in filling in the device handling details. We could use a shared repo to work in this together if you would like. My repo is publicly available. Can I look at the work you have done and see what we can share?
I’m also a Python novice, I deal mostly with C++ and dabble a bit in JS. My current code uses the JSON file from the hub to do discovery, unfortunately there’s no way from the integration report to see if a device is a switch or a dimmer so I allow specificying this in YAML where properties for each device overwrite or add to properties in the JSON file. I suppose you could send a value of 50 to the device and see if it goes to 0 but I’d really, really prefer devices not to change state when starting HASS.
My fork is located at https://github.com/jhanssen/home-assistant/tree/caseta, feel free to have a look. The relevant files are components/caseta/* and components/light/caseta.py, components/sensor/caseta.py, components/switch/caseta.py.
I will definitly clone yours and take a look. Mine are in the component, light, and switch directories and titled lutron.py. I am using lutron becuase of the backwards compatibility with the RA2 and other Lutron specs. This way they can be added on for all Lutron hub units that use the telnet interface. I don’t use the Lutron switches as I have found the GE/jasco Z-wave switches better and look more like a standard decora style switch. I have tested many dimmer products and found that my wife and I much prefer the Caseta. She seems to have problems with the GE and the Leveton just kind of suck. But, to get motion detectors, door switches and other devices you really need Z-wave anyway. If you want to discuss dev issues on this product we could chat via Google hangounts. I have a gmail address, just use 2 b’s in my name instead of one to hit my email.
I am also available for testing. I have quite a few new Lutron Serena Shades to test the shading aspect of the Lutron Control. Not sure how much help I could be on the coding site. I’m super rusty.
No problem on the coding. Could you email me the a copy of the json integration file from you hub with the Serena shades? If you could, add the device number or name of the shade devices so that we can be sure to have the configuration correct. Also, can you connect to your hub with telnet and confirm that the shades go from 0-100 for the range? Or if not, tell us what they do go to on the telnet output? My email is on google with 2 b(s) instead of one.
In looking at the Serena Shades command, it is uncomfortable for us to do the programming for them as neither one of us have them. Since this is open source, after the final product is pulled, someone could easily add the support. Because of the risk involved with a mechanical device, we are going to leave it off on the first round.
Just saw this. I will get to this either tonight or over the weekend. I have a feeling your concerns are a valid to a point. The blind setup and control should be separate commands. If we leave off the setup part, then it would be safe. I think I’m good enough with programming to build off what you guys have to get the blinds going. I’m top ten in the world with copy/paste then find/replace.
I checked the command for the shades. Its the same as a dimmer, with one less field. You can’t set the transition time for obvious reasons. So, its 0-100% for the range.
Just a comment to say I’m looking forward to your progress. I own a Hub, but haven’t used it yet as I’ve configured everything through Wink to this point. I have many Caseta in-wall and plugin dimmers with remotes. I’m not much of a developer type, so likely would not be much assistance in helping to test, but look forward to using your component when it’s pushed out.
Thought I’d quickly share this phenomenal work of code written for Vera in LUA. Although not directly usable for HomeAssistant, I figured there may be some helpful direction in the code for getting certain things working as this plugin supports device discovery and pretty much all of the features one could ask for.
All of the helpful code should be located in the LUA file as I believe the rest is just Vera specific stuff.
Anyhow, I also fit into the group of non-python coders so although I don’t have the expertise necessary to make a big contribution, I’ll start sifting through the code to see if there are any areas I can contribute.
Sorry, I haven’t worked on it for some time. Work has kept me pretty busy. I have ordered more equipment to study implementations better. I have discovered many new capabilities but have not integrated into HA yet. I am also looking at Vera as it is a very mature product and does everything I could ever want. The more I use HA the more clumsy I am finding the user interface and the ability to configure things the way I want. Until someone can come up with a more user friendly front end, HA has a limited user base. HA appears to suffer the same issues that Linux did in the early years. Noobs stayed away because of the complexity of even doing the simplest of things. I like the power of HA but getting it to the state where my wife is comfortable using the features requires a lot more effort than I have time to give. I still have interest in HA and want to spend time on what I believe are it’s shortcomings. Some day I hope to have Lutron Caseta working when I have the time. My work is on github if anyone wants to pick it up.
Now, my main interest is getting my Caseta lights out of Wink. A recent update broke statuses, so manual status changes aren’t seen by Wink. I do own a Lutron Caseta Hub, but haven’t used it with the hopes that someone can get a component for HA built.
My work on HA is suspended after discovering a more mature product that works much better in VeraPro. I may go back and work on HA again but, found it way to clumsy and time consuming to get what I want out of the 50 devices that I have and 80+ scenes and events.