New MultihubReactor Sneak Peak from Patrick Rigney

I ran the numbers, the C7 load is tiny @ 0.022 Amps and I'm running genuine high quality 3500 mAh cells. I shut down after 12 hours, so yeah days is a slight exaggeration as I don't run it that long.

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Interesting. Everything I'd read prior indicated around 7 hours so this rating is a genuine surprise. I'm using one also (although with an undoubtedly lower quality Chinese cell) and have a cut-off rule at around 3 hours just to be on the safe side. Now you've prompted me to do my own testing to see how far it will go :grinning:

That was because no-one tested the true power draw at the wall with a proper Power meter. The previous testing was done with a USB power meter (by @Rxich ) and so no-one really knew what the true power draw number was - 0.3 Amps turned out to be quite inaccurate (for a C7, the older hubs prolly use more power due to being built on an older Chip Fab process). Even at that load, that's still 11 hours & 40 mins runtime.

PS, here's the web calc I use.

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Cool thanks for the info. Very interesting. I've just ordered a similar but 2 battery device as a backup for an rPi. It will be interesting to see how that performs. What kind of life would you expect from such a setup? I have no idea what an rPi would draw (it's a 3b, but I'm also thinking to apply one to a series 4 RPi too if it works ok). This is the device...

THB 573.67 48%OFF | Original 18650 UPS Pro Power Supply Device Extended Two USBA Port for Raspberry Pi 4 B / 3B+ /3B, Not Include 18650 Battery

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Thanks, yeah the cheap chinese power meter is definitely not lab grade equipment, and I don't have another meter to measure mA, with kludging a bunch of connectors & wires together and putting my DMM in the circuit.
It was on a C4, so driving the hub plus the nortek stick would use more power than the C7 alone.
IIRC it was about 10 hours on a genuine panasonic 18650 3400mAh cell for my C4 and I called it off at that point.

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My high school electronics training is a bit rusty, 1.6watts @ 5 volts is about 320mA. What am I doing wrong? 0.022 A seems way to low
image

I just checked my C7 and got about 120mA draw at idle with 10 devices & no rules

I used a Killawatt style device so Im going on what it showed was being consumed from a 240v socket - the load is somewhat variable tho.

Kill-A-Watt (and similar) devices are typically pretty accurate, as you said.

If you measured 1.6 W on the AC mains side, and we assume the low end of the typical 80%-90% range for the AC-DC conversion (which represents the minimum power consumption from your battery), you're consuming something like 1.6 W * 0.8 = 1.28 W on the DC side.

At 5 VDC nominal, that is 1.28 W / 5 V = 0.256 A.

Your 3500 mAh battery should last 3.5 / 0.256 ~= 13.67 h. Which is indeed pretty great, but it isn't quite 159 hours as discussed elsewhere. :wink: I assume some digits got out of whack in all of the unit conversions.

If you go the other direction on the tolerances and empirical numbers (90% eff, 3.8 W @ 240 VAC), you get a lower end on the range of 3.5 / ((0.9 * 3.8) / 5) ~= 5.11 h.

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AH, OK, I have a kill-a-watt also, love that device. So the 0.022 amp draw makes more sense at 240V. I tried to find documents on the hub's power drawer but was unsuccessful.

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Here’s the measurement:

I’ll get out my spare C7 and redo them without the battery UPS in the loop.

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Where are you measuring that? On the 240V side or the DC side?

I think you're in AUS. So, your line voltage is 240 V (rms). Your meter measurement if on the AC side is almost certainly in A (rms). Power = V (rms) * A (rms) = 240 * .021 = 5.04 W.

If you're measuring on the DC side, then I have no idea (which could always be true, regardless). :wink:

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240v at the wall socket.

Correct.

Ok, so your AC real power consumption is the meter reading multiplied by 240. 5W seems high, but maybe you're charging the battery or something.

For battery life, you need to know your DC current consumption. The worst case is that 100% of your AC power is being consumed as DC power. In practice this is more likely 80-90%.

To get DC current consumption you divide DC power by the pack voltage, presumably nominal 5 Vdc.

Then to get battery life duration you divide battery capacity (in Ah) by the DC current consumption.

You can't use the meter current capacity directly in the battery capacity calculation.

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Greetings, @dJOS and everyone. I've been lurking on these forums for quite a while, and maybe it's about time I chime, at least to introduce myself. I'm the author of Reactor for Vera and openLuup (and over a dozen other Vera plugins), and now what I call Multi-System Reactor (although I really like the "Multihub" switch in the topic title...). I'm very much a Hubitat newb, but it's been fun learning and getting a new perspective (I also use Vera, of course, and Hass). MSR is currently in a developer preview. I'm happy to answer questions if anyone has any.

Absolutely right, although the majority of people using it currently in the preview/test seem to run it on a cheap RPi, and there's also a docker container for Synology NAS systems (x86). I think the NAS docker containers are ultimately going to be a big share, as I think a lot of HA users have NAS systems already in their homes, and the load MSR places on the system is, so far, miniscule. Below is the load average on an RPi4 connected to three Veras, my openLuup system, my HomeAssistant system, and my Hubitat (total over 400 devices):

pi@raspberrypi:~/Documents/MSR $ uptime
 08:21:58 up 1 day, 13:41,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
pi@raspberrypi:~/Documents/MSR $

To be clear, I'm not building this to replace anything. It's meant to be an enhancement for the people that need what it offers. As I said in the missive that @mailtomatte reposted here, choices... more choices.

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Hello and Welcome!

I have a quick suggestion. Please forgive me if this is way off base,or you're strictly not interested.
I have some familiarity with an earlier product of yours, because I used Vera many years ago (I still have a Vera Plus in my "drawer of shame"). It was a great product, on a not-so-great system.
One of the things that I personally believe is really lacking in Hubitat is a simple, easy to use, "rules" system on the phone. I believe that most users don't want to use a screen, don't have the capability of using Docker on a NAS, or don't want a RPI. (Please note: I have all three of those, and so do most of the inhabitants of this forum. I'm talking about the majority of users - not us!)
Do you think that it's possible to modify the Reactor to run on a phone with an easy to use UI?

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In the last year or so I took a foray into a geofencing add-on for Vera (and would work with others). To make a long story short, I figured out how bad phones are at anything you have rely on computing-wise. They do all kinds of things that would specifically make a Reactor-like project unusable: they go to sleep, they disconnect from WiFi, etc. And you think, well my phone has settings to turn that off. Some do. Some don't. Some claim to, and won't. When a rule needs to trigger something, it needs to trigger right now. That's just too demanding an environment for a phone, at least, as they are today.

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Great to see you here Patrick, your work with Reactor etc was a big factor in me staying on Vera for about a year longer than I should have. Ultimately tho it gave me time to asses the options and watch various platform mature. I really Liked HA and ran it in parallel with my Vera for about a year on a Pi. However I got sick of breaking changes and it seemed like I spent more time massaging HA than doing my actual job.

Hubitat has been amazing, I have 2 C7's (it's always good to have a dev/test box) and despite hating Rule machine at first, I have grown to appreciate its power. At least it's logical unlike that abomination on Vera known as PLEG.

I'd love to run Reactor on Hubitat, however, I've made the choice that all mission-critical code must run locally on my Hubitats (and Automation falls into that category for me). I have ~8 Hours of battery backup for each C7, however my Servers (Linux and Windows), and NAS's only have 15 mins of UPS backup time. I run AlexaCookie and Home Bridge on my Linux server and everything else runs locally on my C7's.

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My experience was the same when I first tried to break away from Vera in 2017. Man, was I frustrated. I was still on a Vera 3, maybe 70-80 ZWave devices, and it was just flogging itself to death. In a three month period I think I had to factory reset and reinclude everything three times, and during one of the rebuilds it crashed halfway through and I had to start all over. I got through it, but then immediately grabbed a NUC and installed Hass, and I straddled both trying to migrate for quite a while. Like you, the breaking changes broke my enthusiasm. I ended up buying a VeraPlus, and banishing all plugins except those I wrote myself (which included getting off of PLEG). DelayLight was the first problem that needed to be solved, and soon after came Reactor. I've had a good run for a long time, but I'm decidedly not sold on their new offerings, and the handwriting is on the wall for the legacy models and firmware. I'll say Hass has some a long way, too, and Hubitat is here when it wasn't before. Love choices.

I completely understand about wanting your rules local. Perhaps some future Hubitat hardware will let that happen. RE seems well-done. I'm wondering though, what you're really gaining having 8 hours of runtime on your C7s, when in all likelihood every device they control would be without power -- seems like you'd have a bridge to nowhere: automations that run but can't do anything? And that can make a lot of problems, too, as various drivers can't reach devices and time out... I've seen so many systems run perfectly when everything is great, and you introduce some kind of hard error and before you know they're consuming every file handle or socket and rebooting repeatedly or worse -- locking up tight as a drum -- because a buggy error handler doesn't free the resources properly. Anyway, whatever the rules, they're yours, and more power to you, no pun intended! But as someone who has owned and operated a commercial colocation facility/data center, you need to test it in failure, because you don't know what the new failure modes are until you're operating in the ones you've planned for. Send the wife and kids out for the day some weekend and go flip some breakers! :slight_smile:

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I'm using Hubitat's "Safety Monitor" App as the core of my alarm system - all the security devices (Sirens, Door Sensors, Motion Sensors & Security Keypad) are wireless ... intentionally. So if there is a break-in during a power outage, the bandits will still get an ear full! :smiley:

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Make perfect sense. Although, I would still do a thorough test to make sure the system doesn't somehow harm itself when all the other devices aren't accessible. This is one big reason why my rule is that I won't hand over the duty of "security system" to HA. Give me that 25-year old Ademco every time.