Light device type incorrect from HomeSeer

Issues
#1

Most of the lights in my house are UPB and are connected to my Omni controller. All are available in HomeSeer and work as lights just fine (with dimming and everything). I also have a few Z-Wave lights.

However - when I started working on creating lighting groups, I noticed that the UPB lights looked odd. After researching a bit, I discovered that their type was “HSDevice”, and they have no capabilities. I tried manually adding capabilities but that didn’t work.

Further research led me to discover that none of the UPB lights had “Is Light” checked in HomeSeer. So I checked that for one light and did a resynch but no luck. Any suggestions on what to do for this?

#2

The Home Remote uses HomeSeer’s Device_API, Device_Type, & Device_SubType to determine the Capabilities for an object. These UPB groups are probably using unknown values for those 3 fields & therefore the Home Remote cannot automatically determine its capabilities. You will probably need to design a custom template for these lights that instead writes directly to either HSValue or HSStatus. My guess is that writing On or Off to HSStatus will turn these lights on & off.

#3

That makes sense. Thanks for the quick response Bill. Writing On or Off to HSStatus did indeed work, as did writing a dim level to HSValue.

The Omni plugin for HS is written by a third-party developer and he’s quite responsive, so I’ll let him know about this in case it’s easy to fix in his code. In the meantime, I’m happy to work on doing a custom template. I’m not sure exactly the best solution, but I’ll play around and see what I can come up with.

I have to say that I’m actually quite enjoying the programmatic feel of how you configure and control HR. I work in IT, and while I’m not a developer, I’ve done a bunch of programming over the years - almost exclusively in the Windows environment (starting with VB6 (!) and later using C#) so the design UI feels very comfortable and intuitive.

There is a somewhat steep learning curve, but the payoff is very much worth it - at least to me. And I’ve come up to speed much more quickly with HR than I have trying to figure out HomeSeer HSTouch, I’ve only been playing with HR for a few days, and I’m already well on my way to having a nice v1 design that incorporates page browsers, device browsers, and all kinds of triggers.

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