I'm not much of a driver guy, I've only dabbled in modifying drivers for rs232 for other platforms. I have a russound controller existing in my home I am controlling through control4 right now but wondering if theres a way to port the same usability on the hubitat end. I know the hubitat doesn't have a native rs232 interface but looking online it seems there is support on the smart things and openremote utilizing rs232/IP servers to send the commands through the network to the device.
Granted I don't need many commands for the russound, basically just room ON/OFF, source and vol up/down.
Would this be something I could try and cobble together using a sample driver or would this be more complex?
My answer is very limited here and probably not useful at all.
I'm struggling (aka learning) with node-red on a windows 7 computer.
Theorically, node-red can harvest rs232-rs485 (and basically anything) and send the info back to hubitat through existing drivers.
I need to learn more on this because I have modbus devices (rs485 slaves and TCP/IP slaves and masters) and if I can hook them together, I'll merge my actual home automation with HE !
I don’t even think you’d need that. You could just write a serial <> hex TCP driver that cross communicates data. Either that, or the gateway simplifies data and parses things through some simple methods of its own
(When I say write—SmartThings already has a few of these out there, you could use modify them)
is the smart things code similar to that used in hubitat? Someone had a driver for the smart things system so I was wondering if it could be ported over?
This is the only thing that keeps my SmartThings operating. If someone was able to make this work in Hubitat I would be forever grateful. @adamkempenich Thank you for taking a look at this!
So, I don't have a Russound to test this with, but the app and driver both seem to install fine.
Use the instructions from the SmartThings thread, but do them in Hubitat instead. It looks like this uses some intermediate proxy service, so you'll have to set that up, too, I'd believe.
I tried but was unsuccessful. It seems close but I have no coding experience so it would take someone with that skillset and device to make it work.
It did work well on smart things.
Looks like there hasn't been a lot of movement on this. I'm surprised that the SmartThings driver is designed for RS232 instead of RIO. I was able to send simple commands via PuTTY to my Russound based on their RIO protocol - I would think that a driver based on that would be a lot easier than setting up an intermediate Proxy service. I am brand new to Hubitat and haven't done any coding in 25 years, but I may give it a go to get my 2 MCA-C5s onto my Hubitat.
@Bullfrog, I would welcome any progress that you make. I have been looking all over for a way to control my Russound with/through Hubitat. I can easily control it with Putty commands as you have noted. I have tried every way possible to control it in a similar fashion with webcore. But that is UDP, not TCP/IP. I have never written a driver before but I cannot imagine that it would be that difficult to put something together to allow text commands (RIO) to be sent to the Russound via TCP/IP.
Unfortunately, I didn't make it very far. I'm just not familiar enough with with the coding required and the setting up of a proxy in the ported driver isn't of huge interest to me. I think an RIO (Telnet) driver that is set to communicate directly with the Russound (as opposed to via a proxy, which I think was just a way for ST devices to communicate to local network devices, so not needed for Hubitat) is what's going to be required, so I'm sort of hoping that someone smarter than me eventually writes one. I'd be willing to compensate someone to some degree.
