Creating my own ZWave network

1 Background

I have been experimenting with ZWave devices a long time. There are two ZWave controllers I have cast my eye on:

• The Vera Lite http://getvera.com/controllers/veralite/
• VERA PLUS Smart Home Gateway: https://zwave-smarthome.de/shop/vera-plus-smart-home-gateway/

The prior was using a very weak CPU, was very slow, so I decided against it. The latter, oh yes, It got fucked up. And I bricked it, more or less.

The reason was that the device wanted to install an upgrade imge. As always, upgrades are good. So I triggered the upgrade. Unfortunately the upgrade (legacy, standard Vera firmware from the vendor, directly, no tinkering) was corrupt, returning the Vera into a state where it would not react any more. No more. Period. Not even a reset was possible. Nothing.

Whenever I am getting angry, I want to find out if there is a way in. Maybe a serial interface?

So if you take a Dremel like me and try to open the case, it's quite difficult... You easily cut the case in a way so that you won't be able to reassemble it. :-)

2 Next Attempt

Since I got really angry about having a useless Vera, I decided to build my own.

Initially I wanted to use the round hole for a radar detection unit, but since the optical image motion detection was good enough, I decided to use it for the ZWave pairing button.