[OBSOLETE] LutronPro Caseta v1.0

Again, thanks for all the work Bill. I will be getting my picos/switch setup as a multistage timer in the next week or so…or I hope. Honestly I dont forsee a reason to run both lutronpi and lutronpro at the same time. I had just installed the one and was playing with configuring it only to find that the 4button pico wasnt supported. Then came across your fork which had the pico supported and the rest is history.

@adiventure I suppose there’s some way to do an update with git after an initial clone – if you’re using git – but I don’t have it at my fingertips. I think it’s just ‘git pull’ while you’re within the remote branch’s directory (at your end, that is), but don’t take that to the bank; I’m not much of a git user.

One reliable way to update, even if you don’t have git, is to go to the project master’s github page and select “clone or download” and then select “download ZIP”, which will give you a zip file with the full project’s current master file set. Then you can just unzip that where you need it and you’ll be updated.

caution, though: if you’ve modified one of the js files to add your own local IP addresses, authentication info, or whatever, be sure to save that file somewhere safe or it’ll be overwritten!

Git Pull is what I was thinking, just wasn’t sure if there was a npm install after that, or if it would overwrite js configs.

Good point - there could conceivably be dependency changes, in which case a further ‘npm update packagename’ would be in order (or ‘npm --depth 9999 update packagename’ to drill down as well). As it happens, neither the original lutronpro nor the fork lutronpi packages have had any dependency changes in a quite a while, so I didn’t think of that!

Finally switching over to LutronPi from LutronPro. Got it running in a Docker container on my new QNAP NAS!

Only weird thing is my Lutron password was too long. When I tried to enter it in the interactive prompt, it just kept re-asking for my password. Never got to the second time for verification. It was 30 characters. Shortened it, and it worked fine after that.

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@penner42 - easily explained! The node module I’m using for the console supplied a method to collect and verify the password; that has a default max length of 24 characters, which I did not override. I guess I assumed that the Lutron limit was below that. I’ll tweak that to allow maybe 64 characters; I suppose that’ll do it.

Glad to hear it’s working (so far) within Docker, and within a NAS as well… configurations I’ve no way of testing myself. Thanks for the feedback.

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I am getting a lot of ST notifications about the server going offline and coming back, to the point where I disabled those notifications in the SmartApp. Is that normal? It doesn’t actually seem to affect the operation… after an offline notification, my Pico remotes still work before it comes back and says online again. If I have some time, I’ll try to figure out what’s going on, but I doubt I’ll have much time to research it for a while.

I was seeing too many of those as well (mostly when running the node server under Windows than on the R’Pi). I did re-work the offline/online detection scheme in the SmartApp on 07/06/2018, so if you’re not yet running that version, try updating that at the SmartThings end. (It’ll appear in the SmartApp source in the revision list at the top, Version:2.0-20180706). It seems to have reduced/eliminated my false offlines, so give it a shot. On the other hand, the method I’m trying to use for offline detection may be just plain unreliable, so let me know what you find, if/when you get a chance.

Hello,

I have been using a pico remote to control my Lutron shades for quite some time, no issues at all. Now, I can’t use them to control the shades. I checked to see if the commands are registering live within ST and they are. I am using WebCoRE to recognize the button pushed and then make the action. Maybe it’ WebCoRE? When watch the logs within WebCoRE, the button being pushed is not being passed on to WebCoRE, so I think that’s where the issue is.

@smartie - you’re still using the LutronPro v1.0 setup that you had discussed here back in March? You said, above: “the commands are registering live within ST”, so meaning that you see the pico button presses showing up in the LutronPro SmartApp’s logging in your SmartThings IDE? (Not just on the node server’s local logging.) If so, yeah, I’d agree with your guess that the problem has to lie with WebCore picking up on the button press events issued by the Pico’s device handler in SmartThings (that is, the Pico handler associated with that same LutronPro SmartApp.) While I know not much about WebCore, I suspect your best bet is removing its entry for those Pico buttons and re-creating the associated pistons from scratch.

I suppose you could first experiment by setting up a NEW temporary piston that detects those button presses and turns on/off some visible lamp, just to see if THAT works. Just a notion.

btw, back in March you wishlisted automatic reconnect to the Lutron Bridge and notification of offline status. I’ll note that the LutronPi v2.0 fork of this project does provide those features (but would require a complete overhaul of your Lutron installation ST, so maybe not worth your while). There’s also a feature that provide on-press/on-release contact events for Pico buttons, which I thought might be useful for shade control. More info on that LutronPi v2.0 fork is upstream on this thread.

For whatever reason, they now work. Strange.

I’m planning a move to some form of Radio RA2. Does LutronPi have the ability to control the Lutron Connect Bridge (the full RA2, not Select)? User @ssizelove above in #275 noted that he is using a RA2 keypad to control non-RA2 items. Thanks!

@BillD - to the best of my knowledge, the LutronPi setup wouldn’t work AS-IS with the Radio RA2 (non-Select) (and I’m fairly sure that Nick’s original LutronPro version didn’t either).

I believe @ssizelove was referring to a different script he himself (or herself) had written to talk to RA2 keypads. I would guess that was done by talking to the RA2 Repeater directly via its Telnet network interface.

LutronPi could probably be pretty readily adapted to talk to the RA2 Repeater also, since the documented Lutron integration protocol is pretty much the same Telnet scheme as that already used to talk to the Lutron Smart Bridge Pro (and RA2 Select Repeater). It would take some finagling to work out the details - the biggest issue is that the list of Lutron RA2 devices is not available through that interface, so some substantial additions would have to be made to the configuration within the SmartApp.

Contrawise, I’d be somewhat surprised if the Lutron Connect Bridge (which itself is already talking to the RA2 repeater) used a communications protocol that was wildly different than that used by the Lutron Smart Bridge (and RA2 Select repeater). So that might be a more fruitful line of attack. Again, though, hard to do without all that hardware at hand on the programming end. And Lutron might well have implemented a different encryption key for the Connect Bridge vs the Caseta Smart Bridges, even if the communications are otherwise the same.

That’s probably more detail that you really wanted :slight_smile: If you do end up with a “real” RA2 setup with the Lutron Connect Bridge, and want to try running a few diagnostic scripts to see if anything can be shaken loose, let me know. I don’t have any way to implement or simulate it here, myself.

@BillD@BHO is correct for my post, I wrote a python script that monitors the RA2 repeater via telnet and if certain messages are realized it will then tell the Caseta pro to perform some type of action. It is nowhere near as clean as what @BHO wrote, I wish I could code like he did!!, but it works for me.

My take is that if someone took the time to alter LutronPro to incorporate RA2 it would work fine, everything I have done shows a lot of similarities between RA2 and Caseta. The authentication could be different or challenging…also, I should note that I am using the older main repeater style of RA2 not the connect bridge.

@ssizelove - of interest to me: were/are you able to get the RA2 Repeater (via Telnet) to dump a list of device name/type and integration IDs ? The Lutron integration protocol doc describes commands to do that for the QS Standalone system, but doesn’t show anything corresponding to that for the RA2 system. But some other sources I’ve found in the googles suggest that the RA2 actually does have these QS commands, or something like them, in its Ethernet interface only.

e.g. ?INTEGRATIONID,3 to get a list of all integration IDs, then ?DETAILS,id to get details on each
or ?DETAILS,ALL_DEVICES

Thanks @bho and @ssizelove for the information. After searching more, I’ve found that the SmartThings “cousin” hub has Lutron control (Caseta, RA2 Select, RA2 full) built in, using Telnet to interface. So it would seem to be possible in the Samsung environment too. It would be nice to have a single app to control multiple Lutron products - why make Caseta customers rip out their devices if they want to spend more money to add RadioRa2 devices? Lutron makes good products, but has made some questionable marketing calls.

Agreed, they do seem to be shotgunning the market with a broad range of overlapping and not-quite-compatible product lines.

cousin? Guess I havent read enough to know what that one is :)…please elaborate.

I am actually doing the opposite of what you wrote - I am converting mainly from RA2 to Caseta. LED is the reason. I have had RA2 for about 8 years now, loved it, but now that I have been converting to LED as much as possible the RA2 dimmers simply will not work for the load. So, if I recall correctly, $90/RA2 or $50/Caseta … kind of a no brainer. I get pretty much the same functionality, for what I use the devices for. Having built around RA2 I do have afew of the SeeTouch keypads that only work with RA2…and now that I have changed the load circuits to caseta I had to come up with a way to allow the keypads to control caseta devices…that is what my script handles. It isnt sophisticated or clean but it works. I am actually trying to now do something in addition (simply monitor caseta traffic and perform an action) but havent quite been able to make it work yet.
I keep wanting to think Lutron are like evil geniuses and are ahead of the market and that is why we think they make the questionable calls, but then a litte time passes and it simply isnt the case. The products, when you find the right one, seem rock solid though.

Hubitat has built-in support for Lutron hubs (Caseta must be Pro model). You can have multiple Lutron hubs connected at once as well. Hubitat uses Telnet to communicate on the LAN, so performance is very fast and reliable.

@BHO as you probably know RA2 utilizes the Lutron Essentials software to program. Sure, some things can be done via each switch but who wants to do that lol. There is a report option within the essentials software that will show you the information, the headers are:

Device Room, Device Location, Device name, Model, ID, Component, Component Number, Name

Equipment Room, Main Repeater 001, Enclosure Device 001, RR-MAIN-REP-WH, 1

The second and probably more useful option is to grab the XML file showing all of the goods. It can be obtained by simply going to the RA2 repeater IP (again, not the bridge as I dont have it) and the file, for example: http://192.168.0.0/DbXmlInfo.xml and it shows info such as this snippet:

I have been looking to see if I could get a combination to work and dump this via the integrationid command but havent been able to do so just yet. The command is present, if I put in an ID it will return a SN of the device.

Not sure if any of this was helpful, but let me know if I can run anything else, etc. Happy to assist. Just limited on time every once in a while.