I moved into a ten year old house a few months ago that was in dire need of electronics upgrades. Many of the rooms had old style Lutron dimmers, several for each room. So turning on a “scene” meant going to each dimmer and setting it individually. That part of the house has lent itself nicely to being upgraded with SmartThings, now with over 80 devices. The central living area of the house has a Lutron RadioRa system with Grafik Eye 3000 controllers. This is pretty outdated stuff, and difficult at best to interface to in any way, let alone automate.
So I’m faced with the question of what to do about this Lutron system. One path would be to invest in upgrading to RadioRa 2, which opens up more smart control options including web based and mobile, but not integration with ST that I know of. Another path would be to replace the Lutron system with something else. The “something else” would have to be RF based and have multi-button Decora size scene selectors. A third path would be to crack the nut of interfacing from ST to Grafik Eye 3000, either via Telnet to the controllers, or by some other means. In theory I suppose one could create such an interface and map Lutron devices into ST.
My question for the community is: what would you suggest to do?
I looked into RadioRa 2 for my house, and the 18 or 20 loads would cost around $10K. Ridiculous, and it would still not integrate with everything else.
One option is to rip it all out, and replace all of the Grafik Eyes with z-wave dimmers. That would work, but I don’t think any of the currently available multi-button scene controllers are good enough to go that way now. I would have to replace about 10 Lutron scene selectors. So I’m going to wait until there is a better choice for that. The closest right now is the Leviton VCRS4, but that leaves some things to be desired, including complete functionality (dim buttons don’t work).
Upgrading to RadioRa2 is actually not that expensive. You can become certified yourself (which gets you access to the latest software for free and a little sample pack) with about a 10-15 hour investment in going through their training online. After that, the equipment can be had off of ebay for FAR less than retail prices. The software is easy to use and pretty intuitive.
My issue is the integration with a more IFTTT architecture and integrating it with something like SmartThings. I sure wish someone would work this out. There is the telnet capability through the main router, but I am not skilled in navigating that stuff.