SuperHouse 45: First look at the new Shelly Pro 4PM

hi i'm jonathan oxa and this is super house it's a long time since i've shown you the home automation switchboards in my house and not much has changed in them in quite a while but something exciting has just happened ultico robotics has just announced a new shelley and it's possibly going to make me rewire my switchboard so to understand why you need to understand how houses are wired up traditionally and then for home automation traditional house wiring brings power in the form of active and neutral from the switchboard via a switch to the load which could be a light in the house in this example the switch interrupts the active side of the connection and allows power to flow through the circuit or not depending on whether it's turned on or not in retrofitted home automation systems it's really common to use something like a sonoff or a shelley and connect it into the active neutral line so that it can control power to the load then the original switch can either be used as an input to the device or it can be deleted altogether and just control it from your smartphone or whatever else you use for your home automation system alternatively the switch itself can be replaced with a smart switch which includes the load switching and has a control surface that way you have manual control over it using your hand on the control surface or it can be controlled from the home automation system but to do that you typically need a neutral connection through to the light switch location although some smart light switches do manage to get around that but these approaches have really big limitations they are totally dependent on wi-fi if your wi-fi is not working then you can't control things in your house so if you talk to a professional home automation installer there is no way that they would do this as a method of choice it's really something that you do as a retrofit when you've got no other option professionally installed home automation systems typically use a start apology instead of using load switching through switches on the wall what they do is run loads back to a central location like the switchboard or home automation sub board and then use that to control the loads that's exactly how my house is wired up power comes in from the street to the main switchboard from there it's distributed to two sub switch boards each of those switch boards contains relays which are mounted on din rails and they go out to control the loads that way they control inputs which could be from a smartphone or it could be from a control surface like a a panel on the wall or a switch aren't directly controlling the load they are sending commands to the home automation system which in turn turns the loads on and off here in australia the dominant professional home automation system is clipsal c-bus and it works in exactly that way with a start apology inside the automation switchboard there are modules which typically are either a relay output or a dimmer output and the loads are wired back to them and then the automation system can send commands to those modules to turn the loads on and off but it's not really very diy friendly and it's very close source with and expensive so with clips or sea bass it obviously has to be installed by a professional electrician and you can't really change anything a lot of the time the installers will install the system and lock it that's partly for your own protection because what they are used to is customers who will get in and mess around with things screw up the settings and then they've got to come back and fix it so obviously they don't want that happening but what it means is that if you are a a very tech savvy homeowner and you want to modify your home automation system change some of the programming a lot of the time you can't do that so in my own switchboard what you can see here are din rail mounted relays these are mains rated relays that have been mounted inside the switchboard and all of the loads are wired back to them for years now those relays have been controlled by this temporary bodge which is basically an arduino with an ethernet connection which is firing the relays telling them when to turn loads on and off i've had this system in place for years now even though it was only ever intended to be temporary because i've been waiting for a product to come along that would solve this problem and now thanks to ultico it has the device i'm really excited about is the shelley pro 4pm it's a din rail mounted four channel relay device but the really killer feature for it is that it has built-in ethernet and the firmware that comes with it has mqtt support out of the box so and it's got power monitoring that's what the pm stands for so the really cool thing is that i could use the shelley pro 4pm and replace my relays in here and then i don't need this control system at all i can just connect it all up to ethernet send commands by mqtt and control all the loads in my switchboard so let's check out the device and see what it can do now straight out of the box it's this really cool looking black device you can see there's a screen on the top some menu buttons screw terminals on the top edge and screw terminals on the bottom edge along with an ethernet connection now one thing that tripped me up the first time was that it looks like you need to pop out the plastic on these little screw terminals here because you need to be able to get a screwdriver in but you don't these covers just clip off so all you do is clip that off and it exposes the terminals here same thing happens on the bottom so what you can do is make your connections and then because these are slots they just slide back in and cover all the terminals up it's all very neat now the whole thing is designed to admit to go onto a din rail and these are really common here in australia in fact pretty much every switchboard in australia has din rail in it it's just a standard thing now i don't think this is so common in places like the us i think over there this is mainly used for industrial sort of systems but if you can get a switchboard set up with din rail in it it's really handy because what you can do is just clip modules onto it and this is what this is designed to do you can see it's got these two little tabs on the back here and then a clip on the bottom so all you do is you hook the top of the module over the din rail push it down and it snaps into place and now it's firmly fixed so the din rail is mounted vertically on the back of the switchboard or the cabinet and then modules clip into it like this you can have a row of modules all side by side when you want to get them off again there is a little tab on the bottom so typically you'll use something like a screwdriver just pop the tab a bit and it unclips as easy as that so what i'm going to do is connect up a line i have this test lamp here which i've been using for sonoffs and jellies and things over the years i'm going to connect this up and i have power here this is not actually connected at the other end right now but what we're going to do is simulate having this mounted inside a switchboard bring power in just like it would be available in the switchboard and then control the load and see how this behaves okay i've got all the connections in place now there's no power on this yet it's all just connected but nothing alive so earth is not needed by this so the earth connection is just passed right through to the load it's not actually really going anywhere neutral comes through here and is also passed through to the load and there is a neutral connection through to the shelley it needs that for its own power because it's powered by the mains connection then we have active coming in and active comes into the l1 input on here for live one and all of these live inputs are tied together internally so we connected it to live one but it didn't actually matter which one and then one which is output one is the live that is going back out to the load so now all we need to do is pop the covers back on and we can apply power but first what i'm going to do is grab myself an ethernet cable this is connected to an ethernet switch at my workbench and i'm going to plug that in so that when it powers up it's going to have access to ethernet now i'm going to slide myself away over here and plug in power and turn it on so now it'll be starting up and in fact now you can see on the screen it says shelley4 pro so it's showing us the boot process now it's come up with the four output channels it says off for all four channels and on here you can see that there is activity on the ethernet so right now it'll be connecting to the network and in fact there is a status display up in the top right which also shows that it's connected to the ethernet now you can see that it's showing the four different channels on here it says off on all four of them and we can use these menu buttons to select it so if we go down once it'll select the first channel press ok it turns it on so you can see that the light is now being powered through the shelley you can also see that it's reporting about 56 watts being used by that at the moment so if i come back down i can press ok and turn the load back off so we have total local control with no network connection or anything else required which is really handy when you're doing setup and debugging you can control it all through here but if you hold down the ok button it gives us some menu options it goes network setup and status i'm going to come into status and it gives us some information so it's running its own access point at the moment and it's also connected to ethernet and it tells me what its ip address is so what we can do now with this all connected is slide on over to my computer open a web browser and go to the ip address that it's displayed and see if we can get some data off this and control it simply opening a web browser on the same network and going to the ip address that was displayed on the lcd we get this interface and it's very simple to use basically you just click on a channel and as you can see we can turn them on and off we're getting the power reported in here and there are configuration options so in the device you can do firmware upgrades and all the usual sorts of things and in networks we can set up how it's going to connect under wi-fi you can have it connect to two different wi-fi networks i don't have it connected to any wi-fi at the moment you can have it run as an access point i actually don't want it to be an access point so i'm going to turn that off and then we will go into ethernet and you can see that ethernet is turned on it's reporting its own rp address you can set a static ip if you like under cloud you can connect it to the shelley cloud if you want to use their service for remote control but it's not enabled by default which is nice that means when you start this up it's a fully locally controlled device it's not dependent on anything external to work now there is bluetooth which is turned on by default and mqtt i've already configured this with the ip address of my test mqtt broker it doesn't have any authentication or anything i just use this one for doing test setups and it also supports mqtts if you are running an ssl certificate on your broker so that means we can now use mqtt messages to both control and read data from the shelley pro 4pm let's do some tests here with my test mqtt broker so you can see that the topic here is set based on the id of the device each one has its own unique id and then the message is a bit of json so we're sending an id a source the method is switch dot set and params id 0 so this is channel 0 and we want to set on is true so if we make that publication you can see that the channel turns on now turn on to false and now we can turn it off so with mqtt we can now control those channels and if i did 1 and set it to true we would turn on the second output because it's counting 0 1 2 and 3. now we can also read data from it what we're doing here with this subscription is reading from the events topic so i'll do that subscription i'll slide over and manually set the outputs on so i've selected first output press on and you can see the events that have appeared that were published to mqtt by the shelley so we can also get information like whether loads have been turned on or off and how much power you can see there is an a power value there which is showing the number of watts that is being used by the load and that's how easy it is to connect the shelley pro 4pm to an mqtt broker and then be able to control it keep in mind that what i've shown you so far all i have done the only change i've made to the configuration is putting in the ip address of my broker everything else is just left as it was so what you're seeing here is the out of the box experience connecting power to it connecting a load it gets its ip address off the network you go to the ip address put in your mqtt broker and now you can control it this is really really cool and now this is talking mqtt it's going to be a very small amount of extra effort to link this into my home automation system using node red and be able to control it from my phone so let's give that a go what you can see here is a node-red dashboard object which is just a switch and then there is a switch node which sends one of two messages depending on whether it's turning on or off the on message is just what we saw before it's just got on equals true the off message is on is false and all we're doing is publishing that to the topic that the shelley is listening to and that's it that's really all there is to it so now if i grab my phone and i go into the node red dashboard i've got the shelley 4 pro pm object on there just hit the switch and now i can control it you can see that the load is being displayed on here and the light is being turned on and off so out of the box with one configuration change and a little bit of node red i can now control this device and now for the big question which is would i replace all the relays in my switchboard with the shelley pro 4pm and the answer is a resounding hell yes but the problem is certification one of the big issues in australia is that home automation products and all electrical products have to meet very strict certification criteria and it's expensive to achieve so a lot of devices like sonoffs aren't certified in australia but ultico have told me that they are going to seek australian and new zealand certification for this and if they achieve it i'm going to buy about a dozen of them immediately if i put eight of them in the switchboard it would replace all of those relays it'll take up less space the controller would go away i would have power monitoring on every load and i would have status displays and even local control by pressing buttons on here so i mean it's a no-brainer definitely worth doing so if you are wiring a house from scratch setting it up for home automation and you want to start topology control system like mine then i think this is a really really cool product i wholeheartedly recommend it so i'm going to be back soon with another video but in the meantime go and build something awesome [Music]

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 23,097

Rating: 4.9338841 out of 5

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Id: lX_q04bq6h8

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021