New MultihubReactor Sneak Peak from Patrick Rigney

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.

We’ve had a few big power failures since I set it up and the mesh recovered without issue when power was restored.

Due to the layout of my house, all wireless devices are in range of my c7’s.

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So where is this now...still percolating?

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You mean Reactor? Going full steam. I did a full 1.0 release in July of last year and I've been doing upgrades ever since.

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Thanks...I'll go take a peek at it. :slight_smile:

Just an FYI for others perusing this - I was going through the setup instructions and there is a strong recommendation, if you want to run on a Pi, to upgrade to an SSD:

Ive been running msr since dev and it really runs perfect.
I have it on a pie with extrnal Ssd…
Have not touched it in 6month and nerver misses anything! Its a logic reactor on Stereoids!:smiley::ok_hand:

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Has Patrick released this as a Docker Image? That might work better for a lot of folk.

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I have also been running MSR for the last month or so. Familiarising and playing rather than using in earnest but I am pretty impressed so far. Seems very solid, capable and fast.

There is an MQTT controller with MSR now :heart_eyes: and I hope that will expand to support some discovery protocols, particularly the HA MQTT one. I have even had a go at writing my own controller connection to my C-Bus lighting system so that is all discovered and linked into MSR.

The dashboards are interesting and seem to have been architected for future eye candy although currently rather basic. Lacking docs still but this is an area that just eats your time away if you let it.

Watching with interest….

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Yes - there is a Docker page on his site. Supports both NAS (Synology/QNAP running on Intel/AMD CPUs) and RPI (Buster w/patch or Bullseye) install:

https://reactor.toggledbits.com/docs/Installation/#new-install-docker-container

NAS option probably probably won't work for me as I run my two Synology NAS on main VLAN and HA stuff on second IoT VLAN, and IoT VLAN can't initiate connections to main VLAN.

The only Pi on my IoT network is a Pi4-2gb I have for Ecovacs, Node-RED, WeeWX, and Home Assistant. I have a Pi4-8gb arriving in March which I was getting to play around w/Ubuntu, but now thinking I might use it for this. @kevin, what are you running it on, and how's the performance?

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I'm running in Docker on an Intel i5 NUC along with a load of other apps including my main HomeAssistant, IOBroker, NodeRED and MQTT broker. It is very fast although I'm not really loading it very much yet. If I did have any speed issues I'd move something to a Pi4.

I don't think you'd have any problem with a Pi4, they're very capable. 8GB might be overkill but at the moment getting hold of anything Raspberry flavoured is an achievement and you can pop some other apps on too.

Thanks for the info.

Tell me about it - ordered in Jan and not shipping until March 15 at earliest!

Thinking I may set up one of my Pi's to run w/an external drive. I actually may have a spare SSD sitting around from an older laptop, but I don't remember the size of it. I assume I need an adapter board like below to use the SDD w/the Pi? And the details say to run the HDD add-on board w/4A and my Pi4 power is 3.5A so have to replace that as well it seems. One thing leads to another.

https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Raspberry-Storage-Expansion-USB3-0/dp/B086GST5K6/ref=sr_1_5?crid=X5B6WLE8JSDN&keywords=raspberry+pi+ssd&qid=1643435133&sprefix=Raspberry+Pi+SSD%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-5

I'm running Reactor (aka MSR), InfluxDB 1.8 and Grafana on my development/build Pi system, a 4GB Pi4. It's currently reporting 1.9GB free. The Reactor process itself is using 90MB with interfaces running for two Veras, one Home Assistant, one Hubitat, MQTT, one Ezlo, InfluxDB, weather, CoinGecko, and some internal tools. System load average is 0.18 on the fifteen minute metric.

I've run Reactor on the Ezlo Plus, which is basically a souped-up (in terms of processor clock and on-board radios) Pi4, but has only 512MB RAM, and it's no problem (it runs OpenWRT as its OS). That's not a published/supported configuration, but it may be someday...

So, system requirements are pretty modest. An 8GB Pi is definitely more than you need for Reactor alone, but having the ability to run a bunch of stuff with it, side by side, never hurts.

Edit: just because I haven't in a while, I fired it up on a 1GB Pi3 running Buster... runs no problem with 460MB RAM free.

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