I have a good number of LightwaveRF products so I have a couple of comments:
The retrofit sockets do have local control as do the light switches (obviously!)
The plug-in socket adapters don’t, but if you buy the three packs, the come with a remote control handset. If you want to be able to control without involving the hub or an app (which I agree is important) then you can.
I have just converted openHAB control of my LightwaveRF sockets and dimmers to RFXCOM rather than via the Lightwave hub because you can increase the transmission power if your devices sometimes don’t “hear” the command from the hub.
Reliability has been good. In 5 years I’ve only had one item fail. They are cheap - you can get three plug adapters and a remote handset for about £32 and a retrofit double socket for around £40.
I’m much less impressed with the heating side of the range, particularly the TRVs, which I would definitely not recommend. The heating gear is 86MHz so isn’t controllable through RFXCOM and unfortunately no longer works (since a Lightwave firmware change) with OpenHAB.
Hi Barny,
Have you managed to get your sockets to work, I use rfxcom and have many LWRF dimmers which work really well, but I just cant get the sockets to work, cant bind them.
I have both plug in and retrofit sockets working. I used text based config but there is a quick way to get the details to make it work in PaperUI.
You need to have the RFXCOM Bridge set up to receive AD/Lightwave messages and then trigger the socket with the LightwaveRF app, you should see a new Thing appear in the Inbox. You can then click on it to add it as a Thing and create a link to an item.
Thanks Barney
I take it you need the Lightwave rf bridge to use the app - i dont have that - just and rfxcom.
I usually make a thing and then put the LWRF device into pair mode and then flick the switch related to the thing on and then it binds but cant seem to do that as I have tried with Lighting 5 and Lighting 4 and it just does not seem to bind.
The bedroom light is a dimmer and the dining room socket is a socket (obvioulsy!)
These are the corresponding items:
Dimmer Master_Bedroom_dimmer “Bedroom Light [%d %%]” (Lights) [“Lighting”] { channel=“rfxcom:lighting5:rfxcom:RfxBedroomLight:dimmingLevel” }
Switch Dining_Lamp_Near “Dining Room Lamp (near)” (Lights) { channel=“rfxcom:lighting5:rfxcom:RfxDiningSocketL:command” }
I’m guessing it is down to the channel. The dimmer uses dimmingLevel but the sockets use command. I haven’t created Things from PaperUI other than through the inbox and even then, I usually copy the details back to a text config file. I think the Lighting5 subType Lightwave things have all the channels, even if the device can’t use them so you should find the command one in there. If you link an item of type Switch to that, it should work.
Interesting, Pretty much what I have done, just get the switch into learning mode and flick a switch, with all my dimmers its worked a treat - just not with this socket.
Will try again in the morning with a different channel & command but the on/off command should do it (worked with the dimmers).
Good to know its definitely Lighting 5!
Thanks
That would be grand if that’s cool, I’ll hold off for a few weeks though, my house is very dusty and upside down atm where I’ve ripped the kitchen out. Should be finished by 3rd week of June though.
@delid4ve - I have similar requirements to you (re:open protocols and local control) and just came across this thread, on paper the sockets look perfect so I was wondering how are you getting on with them? and do they do 2-way communication?
I did consider these,
However WiFi 2.4ghz already crowded.
And no power monitoring.
The AOne (Aurora) ones I purchased also still have the major issue that after a power cut they default to the off state… not good when your fridge / freezer is plugged into it as I found out! £500 later
I wonder how your getting on with the AOne sockets? I suppose for the issue with the power cut maybe setup an automation to check the status of the socket and ensure its turned on and if not turn it on?
I bought one of these to see if I could integrate it. I have it working via Alexa so that it appears as a smart device in the Alex app then I have a switch item in OpenHAB with a rule that sends the phrase “Turn socket 1 on” to Alexa if the switch is on and “Turn socket 1 off” when the item goes off.
It works but it’s not as neat as I would like.
I’ve tried sniffing the Wi-Fi messages to the socket using WireShark but I see absolutely nothing addressed to the IP address or MAC. I don’t really know WireShark so I must be missing something because I didn’t know that messages could get around the network without being visible to WireShark.
I was hoping to be able to decode the messages so I could reconstruct them (or at least spoof them) via the http binding or a future TCP binding.
There’s a good few places where I don’t need to measure energy because the appliances under control are lights. In those cases, I can either use the consumption figure from the packet or connect my portable monitoring plug for a few hours and get a usage value - it’s probably more accurate than the type of monitor you can fit into a smart device anyway! Obviously doesn’t work for variable loads, although even some of those (washing machine, dishwasher) use a similar amount per cycle even if I don’t know what they are consuming at an instant.
There are a good few appliances that I need to use and use them when I need them so knowing what they consume doesn’t inform any decisions. I have enough data about the house without adding more that doesn’t provide any value!
I can see the IP address and MAC but not what it is doing. Look like there’s progress being made here using the Broadlink protocol so hopefully a binding on its way soon.
