Mac Home Automation

XTension is fully compatible with the newest Vera Plus models. They offer a lot of new functionality adding in ZigBee and BlueTooth LE device support as well as the upgrade to ZWave plus which supports many new multi-devices and easier remote adding to the network and such. That may be compelling enough that you will want to upgrade to the new box.

There are several articles on the Vera support site about transferring the ZWave devices from your old box to the new one. I followed This One for updating from a Vera Lite to the Vera Plus.

While you’re doing the transfer you can leave your current XTension connection to your previous Vera connected and running normally. It will continue to control lights and other devices throughout and even after the process so there is no reason to disconnect to it while it’s running.

The only problem I had with the Vera process was that the new box simply refused to accept the transfer from the old box until I rebooted it. The 2 interfaces have to be sitting next to each other physically as well it seems. Once I rebooted the new Vera it did finally show me a message that the transfer was running.

The transfer takes some time and then the new box has to talk to and configure each node which can take a lot more time. Mine was an hour before any devices started to show up in the devices list on the new box and initially most were not working or showing errors. As it continued to chew on them things cleared up. When all the devices are visible you can then upload your backup of all the other of your config. After uploading the backup I still had many devices that were not responding or could not be reached. It took some time to get everything setup again and working. Overnight it did it’s re-routing magic and this morning everything is working again. So be patient with the process it will come back to life.

Depending on what software version you’re transferring the backup from it may not get the network settings, or it may get the network settings. If the network settings are successfully transferred with the backup then when the new Vera starts up it will try to get the same static IP that you assigned to the old box. If thats the case then neither of them will work properly. You’ll have to power off or disconnect the old vera to let the new one have the address. At this point XTension will log an error and attempt to reconnect, which it will now do to the new vera and everything will just keep working exactly as before, no other changes except possibly updating the user/password in XTension necessary on your part.

If the new vera was a different UI version then it will likely not get the networking config from the old box. In that case you’ll have to go in and give the new vera a static IP address. At this point you can either disconnect the old Vera and give the new one the same IP, in which case XTension will just re-connect to the new box and keep working, or give the new vera a new static IP and then make that change to the interface config in XTension and then reconnect.

The most confusing thing I hit in the process of the upgrade was the fact that I had to create a new account for the new Vera since the old one still connected through their old site. This meant I had a different userid and password for the new Vera than the old vera. Once I restored the backup from the old vera to the new one it changed the user/password of the new vera back to the old one. This worked for local connections from XTension just fine, but I’m still logged into their cloud with the new user/pass. Since XTension makes a local connection you’ll need to use the original user/password that you had set. If you had the “protect this vera” option turned on to require the password in the first place. If you didn’t have this option turned on then there is nothing to change.

Avoid the temptation to create a new interface in XTension to point to the new Vera. There is no purpose served by having a connection to 2 veras with the same ZWave devices attached. It will just try to create duplicate units for the new interface and you’ll have to delete them all and transfer the units from the old interface to the new one. Far more work and confusion. Just point your existing interface from the old IP address to the new IP address and re-enable it. Everything will just keep working.