Occupancy sensor with Lutron Caseta and SmartThings

[rhett7660]

For those of you waiting for the occupancy sensor to come to Caseta, I doubt it ever will
http://business.lutron.info/webmail/...9c9be50587f1c5
That says to me, that it will only come to RA2 Select and above.
But perhaps I am mistaken and there has already been an announcement for Caseta.

I am now considering replacing my entire system to RA2 Select.

That just sucks and is nice kick to the neatherlands for us. Ugh. Come on Lutron, give some more love to the folks who are using Caseta.

[rodrigo]

So how long until a homeowner or one of their hacker kids reverse engineer ClearConnect? At their current rate of complacency it's only a matter of time. Either that or someone will come along and give Lutron some real competition. Until that time, I might just have to figure out how to hardwire a pico remote to an occupancy sensor :)

By the way... I'm curious -- Does Lutron even pay attention to this forum? I get the feeling like we're not getting heard.

You got me thinking about how to solve this and I think it is doable in a simple way.
With a RA2 Select hub, and the occupancy sensors hooked up to that hub, the output events would show up via the telnet integration.
Something like
~OUTPUT,3,1,100.00
~OUTPUT,27,1,100.00
~OUTPUT,2,1,100.00
~OUTPUT,27,1,50.20
~OUTPUT,2,1,50.20
~OUTPUT,3,1,50.20
~OUTPUT,3,1,0.00
~OUTPUT,2,1,0.00
~OUTPUT,27,1,0.00

Of course the ones that correspond to the occupancy sensors (http://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocum...ary/040249.pdf)

So, using something like a RasperryPi to serve as a bridge between a Caseta hub and a RA2 Select hub the messages could easily get passed along.
The only "difficult" part is to build the small application on the Pi to manage the mapping between what you want done when a event from the occupancy sensor is triggered.

As soon as the occupancy sensors that work for RA2 select are available I am going to try this, I already have a few Pi devices laying around.

[rodrigo]

An update on this approach.
Some bad news
The RRA2 Select and occupancy sensor do not have the monitoring events enabled.
After some back and forth, Lutron confirmed that they do not, and do not plan on adding that feature.
Which means that the RRA2 Select bridge can't be used for this proxy idea.

That being said, I just don't want to drop 5 or 6k on new gear to get the benefit of a occupancy sensor.
I found a fairly cheap used RadioRa2 repeater, and added 2 occupancy sensor.
These do emit the monitoring events I expect.
Which means creating a simply proxy to push these events down to a Caseta pro bridge is pretty simply.

I have most of the basics working now.
This is not really a great solution, but probably the best solution I can come up with if I want to stay all local in home network.

[skypickle]

@rodrigo
So why is the ra2 repeater approach to integrate an occupancy sensor to control casita lights better than using a smart things bridge with a Lowes occupancy sensor (iris)?
Sensor->ST BRIDGE-> CASETA BRIDGE->light

[rodrigo]

@rodrigo
So why is the ra2 repeater approach to integrate an occupancy sensor to control casita lights better than using a smart things bridge with a Lowes occupancy sensor (iris)?
Sensor->ST BRIDGE-> CASETA BRIDGE->light

Don't know if what I am exploring is any better, here are my thoughts as I think about your question.

Don't know enough about ST hub and how it connects with the Lutron controls.

If ST uses ClearConnect to communicate directly with the Lutron controls, if so then that would be a big plus for ST. I am going to guess that is not the case, if it needs the Caseta bridge in place.
If ST connects directly to the Caseta bridge in a Lutron "sanction" approach, that is a good win for ST. I say that since 1) you need a Caseta Pro bug in order to get access to the integration protocol (ie. telnet). 2) You are at the whim of Lutron on if the choose to remove/abandon the integration protocol for Caseta.

Does ST need an active internet connection to drive the Lutron devices? if that is so, then that is a downside of using ST. With what I am exploring the RA2 repeater just needs to be on my LAN so that I can chat to my Caseta bridge. The actions I push to my Caseta bridge all happen locally. If this is the same with ST, then there is no difference.

There is a higher bar to play with RA2, since you need to do the silly online class to get access to RA2 Windows software.
In what I am exploring you still need something like a RasperyPi somewhere on the LAN to take the role of a proxy for these monitoring events. So you need some working knowhow of how to work with RPi, NodeJs etc.

I like the idea of sticking with ClearConnect for how my lighting controls connect with their driving "bridges/repeaters", since so far CC has been solid at home for me. I don't own ST so I can't speak to how well its connection works out, they use Z-wave and ZigBee I think.

Are the Lutron Occupancy sensors any better than the PIR Iris sensors? Don't know. I know that the Lutron sensors are both PIR and ultrasonic. Have only played around with the Lutron sensors, and so far they do exactly what I want them to do.

So is it better? meh-shrug, don't know. I would have to try out both approaches and get a sense of how the pros/cons play out. Don't think I am going to spend any $ on ST right now though.

[skypickle]

@rodrigo
is this the repeater you used?
RR-AUX-REP-WH

[rodrigo]

@rodrigo
is this the repeater you used?
RR-AUX-REP-WH

Nope, that is a Auxiliary repeater

I used the main repeater: RR-MAIN-REP-WH
http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Products...elNumbers.aspx

[skypickle]

my understanding is that that the smart bridge pro cannot connect to repeaters.

[rodrigo]

my understanding is that that the smart bridge pro cannot connect to repeaters.

That is correct, they can't.

I am using a Raspberry Pi running some software I wrote in NodeJs that connects to both, my Caseta bridge (pro) and the RR-MAIN-REP-WH.
The software serves as a proxy, and listens for MONITOR events on the RRA2 repeater, and then issues the commands I want to my Caseta bridge.

So when the occupancy sensor that is linked to the RRA2 system emits something like "~DEVICE,19,2,3" I take that and turn it into something like "#OUTPUT,3,1,0"

It is all working.
All I have left to do is make a more concrete map of my source-->target commands, and update my Pi.

[bizzle]

I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up yet, but the simplest way to address the occupancy sensor issue is to use an Ecobee. Its sensors show up in Homekit as motion and temperature sensors and can be used as triggers. I use my Ecobee and its sensors to automate various lights in my home based on occupancy in their respective rooms. I'm not sure if the sensors can be hacked to work with a different controller if you don't want to use an Ecobee thermostat--I haven't looked into that.

oops, I'm sorry. I posted under the assumption that people are using Homekit since that was the reason I migrated my lighting to Lutron Caseta but that's a faulty assumption now that I think of it. Additionally, there are other motion sensors that are Homekit compatible so Ecobee sensors aren't the only way to do what I am suggesting.

A better suggestion is that, if you have Homekit, you can trigger Casetta lights with Homekit sensors.