Virtual Sensor???

[Mike Yeager]

This may have been answered before but I haven't been able to find it (even though I seem to find references to it). Is there any way to create a virtual sensor? I'd like to be able to import a few things around the house, such as the temperature of my water heater, that I'm already monitoring but I can't seem to find a "dummy device" to attach it to. Dummy Device only gives me the option of binary switch or multi-level switch.

Mike

[pz1]

Mike, I don't fully understand what you try to achieve. What kind of tempertature sensor do you have in your water heater. I guess it is a non z-wave sensor?

[Mike Yeager]

My water heater is solar and is operated by an Arduino controller. The data is sent to the RPi and is used to update a display. I would be updating the Virtual Sensor by way of one of the API's that are available. Kind of like a the current Dummy Device that could be used in rules and such but really has no other interaction with Z-Wave. Does that make any sense?

Mike

[pz1]

I do not have experience with sending data to ZWay. I've done polling data from external devices like in your case an Arduino. If the Arduino had a little webserver where you can read data, you could use the HTTP App to retrieve your temperatures into a multilevel sensor.
What protocol does your water heater use to send the data?

[Mike Yeager]

The Arduino sends the data to the RPi as a JSON string over a wireless XBee link. I hadn't thought of using the web page that's displaying the information anyhow as a way to pull data into ZWay. I was just looking to update it every so often kind of like updating a dummy device. Will look into that.

On another note, any chance of adding the option of multiple instances to a dummy device?

Mike

[pz1]

On another note, any chance of adding the option of multiple instances to a dummy device?

The dummy device App does allow multiple instances (See its module.json that states: "singleton" : false,)

update: You could elaborate on the OpenWeather app to taylor it for your heater. (Ihave done the same to derive the Wunderground app that you can find in the App store

[Mike Yeager]

The protocol doesn't make a difference due to the fact that the data is received on the RPi and can be transferred into the ZWay environment by any means necessary. I'm still looking into this but, for the moment, I've abandoned it for a few other more important projects.

[Mike Yeager]

I have conquered the DummySensor task. There are several examples of it uploaded to the developer page to be included in the App store. It will probably take a day or two to get them approved so be patient. The three modules are TempF, HeatIndex, and Dewpoint. They accept input in Celsius and output to their own UI elements in Fahrenheit. It would be easy enough to add an option to convert HeatIndex and Dewpoint back to Celsius. Maybe I'll do that just to make the modules useful to more people...

[millahjovich]

Mike, I don't fully understand what you try to achieve. What kind of tempertature sensor do you have in your water heater. I guess it is a non z-wave sensor?

[Mike Yeager]

The sensor attached to my water heater goes to the Arduino that controls the solar heating of my water. It relays information back to my house controller (where ZWay resides) so I can display it. This data arrives in a JSON string by way of ZigBee radio. What I was trying to do (and have since figured out how to do), was to simply create a dummy sensor to import the reading of this sensor. It really serves no purpose other than for display but in the future, I could use it for other things. I'm currently using this technique to bring my Arduino based pool control system under the ZWay umbrella.