Vera smart home gateways, like Vera Edge or Vera Plus are awesome yet affordable hubs which can transform your home into a true smart home. Using Z-Wave wireless technology makes it easier to start at a low budget and solve a few day-to-day problems and then expand to other areas of smart home automation at your wish.

Vera gateways allow you to not only create an intelligent mesh network of smart IoT devices in your home, e.g. light smart switches, dimmers, thermostats, locks or blind controllers just to name a few, but also to create automated scenes or mini-programs to make your life easier and safer.  While it is possible and relatively easy to create a simple or medium complex scene without a need to program a line of code with Graphic User Interface (GUI), writing more complex automation would require some programing skills.

Thanks to Patrick H. Rigney and his excellent contributions to the list of Vera app plugins (useful and practical extensions of Vera gateway functionality) we have an easy way to create even the most complex smart home automation logics. The new plug in is called REACTOR and is available for free via the Vera app store and directly from Github repository. While the plugin is free to download and use, please consider making a donation to help support this excellent extension of Vera gateways.

The full documentation showing all the capabilities are at this wiki. If you prefer visual learning please check this dedicated YouTube channel of instructional “how-to” videos.

In principle using the REACTOR plugin in Vera smart home gateways you can use all AND, OR, XOR, NUL and NOT Conditions of your input triggers, calculate complex Expressions which are variables based on state of your real and virtual devices in the systems plus define all the Activities which are the actions you want perform in various scenarios.

Another thing worth mentioning is that REACTOR automation will survive the restart of a Vera engine, and that you can stop the automation manually if required (which is not a standard Vera scenes feature). 

In summary, this fantastic extension of Vera smart home gateways, made by Patrick H. Rigney allows you to create virtually any sophisticated automation in your home without line programing. Our thumbs up to Patrick!