Hi, first time poster here. Just installed HA. We recently bought a house filled with Lutron classic RadioRA switches (not radioRA2) and I’m trying to see if there is any way to integrate them with HA. I know that there’s an RS232 interface available for controlling the switches but I have no idea how to get that working with HA. I have a CS degree and spent my career writing code but I don’t know enough about HA to even get started.
Does anybody have any ideas or suggestions?
I know this is an old post, But so is RadioRa “classic”.
I finally got around to Linking the remnants of my old RadioRa into the rest of my HA. I once had over 40 Ra-1 devices and that’s now down to about 8. The rest migrated to Caséta and other modern options.
Since I have a Chronos bridge, I used an ESP32 to build a serial-to-MQTT bridge to the Chronos. To talk to RadioRa1, you need either a Chronos or an Rs232 interface. The RS232 command set is dirt simple and reliable. However, one major limitation is that the gateways do not report the current dim level (so I track the last value sent and live with the possibility that someone changing brightness at the switch could cause a slight out-of-sync.)
Why keep RA1 at all? (For the lurkers)… I’m lazy and don’t want to actually take the last batch out of the wall. 
I like physical keypads/buttons (although I can now use the Caséta picos with the pro hub), I have a Grafik Eye with a RA1 interface, and, well, just because I wanted to make 30 year old gear work.
You’ve inspired me to revisit this issue. I still have dozens of RA1 switches in the house. I don’t have a Chronos but the RS232 interfaces are dirt cheap on eBay. I’ll write back after I’ve had a chance to play with it.
Bph, quick question. I’m assuming I’ll be able to send serial commands to the Radiora RS232 interface via a usb to serial cable (im running HA unsupervised on a laptop), and that I’ll need to use MQTTT to issue commands to control the lights. But I’m not sure how to bridge the MQTTT to RS232. Do I need additional hardware or can I somehow bridge the two in software?
I did it with an ESP32 (a more powerful ESP8266) because it natively supports multiple serial ports in hardware. Serial0 is for programming and debugging and Serial1 is connected to a TTL to RS232 converter. The Chronos is RS232.
The ESP32 sends and receives MQTT over WiFi just like all my other devices.
I assume that HA could talk directly to a serial device — but then there would be no reason to use MQTT, I don’t think.
You could use a rPi or a PC instead of a Microcontroller (ESP32) to send and receive MQTT on the network and Send and receive serial to the Lutron. I’d have to check to be sure but I think the Pi also has TTL serial, not RS232, so you’d still need a level converter.
In another home, using another HA system (called charmed quark), I had many devices directly connected with serial (rs232) to the PC running the controller. Wifi and MQTT is so much easier.
Thanks for the reply. I went a slightly different route. I’m using the command_line switch platform, which lets me execute a script from HA in response to a turn on or turn off command. The script uses pyserial to send the appropriate strings to a USB port which is connected to the Radiora ES232 box. I can’t control the dim level but that’s ok for now.