I have various Leviton Z-Wave dimmers and a Leviton VRC0P serial to Z-Wave controller that connects to a Universal Remote MSC-400 controller. The controller sends serial commands over RS-323 to the VRC0P which then controls the lighting in the room. The MSC-400 only has serial (and IR) outputs so this was my way of bridging the remote control to the lighting. This has all been working fine, but I want to switch to using Hubitat as my controller for the ZWave network for a variety of reasons. I can't seem to include the VRC0P into Hubitat. Hubitat never seems to see it.
So I'd appreciate some help in one of two directions - does anyone know how to get the VRC0P to be included into the Hubitat? I'm not super-familiar with exactly how Z-Wave works but I think the VRC0P is supposed to be considered a secondary controller in the network - not sure if that changes how you do the inclusion.
If this is not possible, them I'm open to buying some other device that can take serial commands and convert them into something that Hubitat can understand and trigger Z-Wave commands.
No specifics to offer, but I can think of three possible approaches.
One is to convert the RS232 output of the MSC-400 to Zigbee (or zwave) and pair the resulting device with HE. Then write a custom driver. XBEE might make such a product.
Another is to use an RS232-IP converter and some sort of telnet session from HE to the ethernet end of the converter, along with a custom driver.
And lastly though there are plenty of zigbee-based IR blasters, I was thinking maybe you could find a zigbee IR receiver and basically bypass the MSC-400 altogether.
While this would make an interesting project, I'd guess it would be a LOT of work just to get your remote to turn lights on and off.
The VSC0P basically is a device that would implement your first option - converting RS-323 to ZWave. I was finally actually able to get it to include in the Hubitat network, but of course Hubitat has no idea what the thing is, so it looks like Option 1 would be to figure out how to build a custom driver for a new Z Wave device. Basically as far as I can tell, I need the Hubitat to understand how to properly configure the VSC0P using whatever ZWave commands it's expecting from the Leviton controller. I did a little more digging and looks like the VSC0P is indeed a secondary controller, so all I really need to do is figure out how to get Hubitat to program it and the VSC0P can actually do the ZWave commands to devices itself. I'm going to keep digging on this one...
Your second option (RS232-IP converter) was kinda what I was thinking since I could then make it so the Hubitat is doing all the Zwave pieces, but sounded like a lot of work.
The third option won't work because the remote talks to the MSC-400 via some custom RF protocol - so the only way to get anything "out" from the remote is via the MSC-400. But this got me thinking that I could put an IR blaster output from the MSC-400 into some kind of Z-Wave / Zigbee IR receiver that Hubitat understands and use that. That's another option worth pursuing...
I was thinking maybe you'd find something that isn't a secondary controller but rather an end device, but I haven't actually found anything. I have paired a secondary controller to HE but never for that sort of use - more for getting rid of ghosts.
The process for inclusion of a secondary controller is pretty much the same as any zwave device - you put the hub into include mode and then do the same on the device. But in your case IS there a way to put the device into inclusion mode? And if you did it would likely appear as an unknown device type so you'd still need a custom written driver. I'm also not sure if a zwave secondary controller can also be an end device...
Well, I finally got this all back and running. I tried the inclusion process for the serial interface (VSC0P) and eventually it actually showed up in Hubitat and was able to let me name it. This alone however wasn't particularly useful because you need to associate the devices that the VSC0P is allowed to control with the controller. Turns out the VSC0P itself is indeed a secondary controller. I couldn't figure out how to do this with Hubitat, so I decided to find the old Leviton controller I had and was able to factory reset it and also was able to associate it with the Hubitat as a secondary controller. From the Leviton controller, I was able to push the association to the VSC0P so that it could then see devices and control them, all the while still having the Hubitat as the primary controller for the environment which is what I wanted.
The only thing I would like to additionally do is have a way for the VSC0P to send a command to the Hubitat itself - like if there was a way to have a virtual device with a real ZWave ID so that the Hubitat could do non-Zwave things in response to the Z-wave command from the serial port. This will be a stretch goal - for now I'm just happy that I have everything working again with the Hubitat in the environment, even if it did require me pulling out that old Leviton controller to get it all working.
