So I took the plunge and ordered (at a very good price from BTBusiness) a power starter set and 3 additional sockets. I didn’t want to go this route but seeing as there is no z-wave or other alternative for U.K. Sockets I thought I’d take a chance seeing that ifttt support and Alexa integration was present.
I’m now regretting this decision…
Alexa works well so I thought I’d create a workaround for openhab control and set up some dummy switches/rules and use ifttt to update the status from light wave / control light wave from openhab cloud.
Set it all up… ifttt just doesn’t work with the lightwave, doesn’t even blink. Great.
Is anyone actively working on a v2 binding now the api has been released…
I also tweeted lightwave but they just don’t respond.
There’s such a gap in the market for uk sockets and no one seems to be jumping in… how can we automate a home without power and monitoring… seems crazy from where I’m sitting. Lightwaverf just don’t get ‘integration’. Plus the fact of no ‘local’ control.
A few other points…
Terminals on the sockets close together and not of great quality
Energy consumption not exposed to Alexa/ifttt
Led colour can only be changed for the off state, it’s always blue for ‘on’ which seems crazy when you can set green for off.
Energy consumption can be set to reset at various intervals but doesn’t seem to log historical data
Have you considered using an RFXTRX433XL with these? Have some older Light wave RF plug - in units and they work reasonably well with the RFX. Agree on the whole power consumption part, LRF are not really up to speed in this respect
The new Lightwave gen 2 product operate on 868 I believe, and i think I’m right in saying the traffic is encrypted due to the HomeKit compatibility, someone please correct me if I’m wrong though and offer a solution
Look good, but having done extensive ‘googling’ the bottom line seems that because of the HomeKit approval the traffic is encrypted and can’t be controlled locally without sever authentication. I hope either someone can reverse engineer it or Lightwave sort their $€%# out.
Product has so much potential, and I’m sure if it was opened up a bit more they would sell a lot more. Maybe even have a configurable item to enable HomeKit/disable local control and vice versa.
I’ve tweeted them 3 times now and not had a single response.
The solution is the API I’m afraid, now that they have decided to throw their lot in with Homekit, so there will be no local control.
Leaves a market for someone else to exploit I suppose, but realistically I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
Their heating controls have long used proprietary 868, and no one ever found a way around that to my knowledge.
It all comes down to whether anyone with the skill to exploit the API wishes to use Lightwave gen 2 I’m afraid. So far no-one seems keen, within any home automation ecosystem - it would be great if Lightwave themselves stepped in to write plugins for popular platforms…
Yeah I kinda didn’t read up enough (about gen 2) before I took the plunge.
I’m using the HomeKit integration atm with a dummy switch to get them into openhab. Will look at the api in more detail at some point in the future, unless my new plan turns out:
I’ve just stripped down an mk double socket to look at the internals to separate the sockets (power feed) and look at integrating some form of relay, probably a Shelly 1PM (when they’re released) as there’s not much else cheap enough with energy monitoring that can handle 3kW loads at 230volt.
Just need access to a 3D printer now to get a prototype going. After all… no one else seems to want to forfill the uk market on a local level
