Two Max! Cubes connected to pimatic?

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Re: Max! Cube

Max! Cube and several thermostats are working quite satisfactorily for me. However, there is a limitation of the cube to 10 rooms and for some reason I need more, so I was wondering how to connect 2 cubes to pimatic. Technically it should be possible to have 2 cubes on 868 and IP, as it is possible to assign them IP addresses.

The max plugin is currently designed to operate just one cube, allowing 1 IP address. Trying to add the max plugin twice is, of course, also not a good idea, and expectedly yields: [pimatic] error: Startup error: Error: Duplicate plugin max in config.

Although I have no experience with Coffee in particular, I could try my hand with a bit of programming. But any hint regarding how I could go about getting the 2 cubes connected will be much appreciated.

Before starting to think about details on how to change the plugin my question is: Do you already have two cubes and are you able to configure them with software provided by the vendor?

I currently have one cube only, and this post. I wanted to avoid buying another one in case I can’t operate it from Pimatic – a bit of a chicken or egg problem I did use the vendor’s software to configure the cube with an IP and register the thermostats.

If it helps for testing etc., I can buy another cube.

@bmx Thanks for the info. Meanwhile I have reviewed the plugin code and notice the “max-cube” base driver is pretty much outdated. Thus I would also like to trial an alternative drive, but I have no Max! Cube at the moment. It’ll great if you can do some tests with the new driver. There is another project available which provides a command line tool for the driver to querying devices and sending commands.

https://github.com/ivesdebruycker/maxcube-cli

git clone https://github.com/ivesdebruycker/maxcube-cli.git
cd maxcube-cli
npm i 
node maxcube-cli.js <ip> [<port>]

Cool, will do that and come back with the results here.

Here are the results: The connection is established and data is received. However, I believe there are a some flaws in this driver. My observations:

• The driver reads and displays a status, but it does not reliably read the current temperature and shows 0 in most cases. True enough, the temperature is only updated when the thermostat changes the valve, but there should at least be the most recent value. The current driver always does get the most recent value, however.
• It does set mode and temperature setpoint.
• The driver apparently does not distinguish between wall thermostats and heating thermostats. For the wall thermostat data does not show the current temperature, which would be one of its main functions. It shows a valve value, which I think does not make too much sense. I believe the wall thermostats control the temperature setpoints of the associated heating thermostats, but not the valve. Each thermostat computes the valve value from the temperature setpoint and the ambient temperature.

When starting pimatic again with the current max plugin, pimatic received strange values for a while. I wonder if the new driver confused the cube somewhat. After some minutes the correct values were received again.

Here is the result of a call with max-cli. I can post more, including the temp and comm commands or the plain JSON result, if that’s of any help.

maxcube$ status -v
┌──────────┬────────────────────┬──────────────┬────────┬──────────┬───────┬──────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────┬───────┬───────┬────────────┬───────────────┬──────────────┬────────────┐
│ RF addr… │ name               │ room         │ mode   │ setpoint │ valve │ temp │ battery_low │ initialized │ fromCmd │ error │ valid │ dst_active │ gateway_known │ panel_locked │ link_error │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 1a41d6   │ Boden              │ Wohnzimmer   │ MANUAL │ 19       │ 32    │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 19c93f   │ Wall Thermostat 1  │ Wohnzimmer   │ MANUAL │ 19       │ 4     │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 1a41cd   │ Thermostat Doppel… │ Schlafzimmer │ MANUAL │ 21       │ 100   │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 1a4072   │ Thermostat Doppel… │ Schlafzimmer │ MANUAL │ 21       │ 100   │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 1b1237   │ Bad Eltern EG      │ BadEltern    │ MANUAL │ 4.5      │ 0     │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 1adb87   │ Wandthermostat SZ  │ Schlafzimmer │ MANUAL │ 21       │ 4     │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
├──────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┼────────┼──────────┼───────┼──────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼────────────┼───────────────┼──────────────┼────────────┤
│ 178ed2   │ Wand               │ Wohnzimmer   │ MANUAL │ 19       │ 60    │ 0    │ false       │ true        │ false   │ false │ true  │ true       │ true          │ false        │ false      │
└──────────┴────────────────────┴──────────────┴────────┴──────────┴───────┴──────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────┴───────┴───────┴────────────┴───────────────┴──────────────┴────────────┘
{ duty_cycle: 9, free_memory_slots: 49 }

Hi there, the heating period is back, and so my question Is there any chance we pick this up again? Again, a hint were to start would be quite helpful. Happy to do some more testing, too.

Finally shot another Max! Cube at ebay. I can confirm that both my Cubes operate well side by side, with the standard Max! Cube software, assigning different IP addresses, of course. Used Christmas in order to learn a little CoffeeScript and wormed myself into Node. Then I did some hacks to maxthermostat.coffee, mainly duplicating some lines and with hard-coded IP addresses. But so far it works OK, and I can read thermostate values and set their temperatures. Now I have 2 questions:

• At the end of the file a class MaxCube ist defined. However, I believe the constructor never runs. Any hint about when this class is actually instantiated and what it does?
• I’ll try to clean up the code and prepare is so that it can deal with 2 Max Cubes which get their configuration from config.json. Is there any interest to get this into the main tree? If so, how should I go about it?