Uk Sockets - Lightwave Alternative WITH Local Control

Hardware Home Automation
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21

Just come back to the thread after a long time.

I moved away from LightwaveRF heating devices and now have Drayton Wiser, which is much better and also supported in OpenHAB.

22

I also have Drayton wiser (3 years now) - lightwave just for my sockets, Zwave for everything else.

I am however trying to get my Aurora sockets added with zigbee but struggling at the moment

23

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.

24

I did consider the bg sockets. Don’t have energy monitoring though which was a non starter for me.

Have a look on an mDNS browser too to see if it publishes any lan services.

25

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.