Lutron Homeworks

Lutron is an American lighting control company. The Lutron Homeworks Series 4 & 8 systems are relatively old (~2003), and use RS-232 connections to communicate with home automation systems. The homeworks integration in Home Assistant is responsible for communicating with the main controller for these systems. Communication is through an ethernet to serial converter (NPort, for example).

Only a subset of the Homeworks system is supported - lights and keypads.

Lutron has created many systems over the years, each with their own unique interfacing protocol. There are three Homeworks systems - QS, Series 4 & 8, and original. This platform is only for Series 4 & 8. There is another integration lutron which handles Lutron RadioRA 2 systems.

Homeworks keypad buttons are momentary switches. The button is pressed and released, meaning that there is no “state”. Buttons generate homeworks_button_press and homeworks_button_release events. These events contain the “id”, “name”, and “button” of the button that was pressed. “id” is derived from “name”, and “button” is the number of the button on the keypad (starting at 1). It’s also possible to add binary sensor entities which indicate if a keypad LED is lit and button entities which can be used to trigger the actions bound to a keypad button.

Configuration

To add the Lutron Homeworks integration to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

Manual configuration steps

If the above My button doesn’t work, you can also perform the following steps manually:

  • Browse to your Home Assistant instance.

  • Go to Settings > Devices & Services.

  • In the bottom right corner, select the Add Integration button.

  • From the list, select Lutron Homeworks.

  • Follow the instructions on screen to complete the setup.

The protocol for automatically extracting device information from the controller isn’t documented. Lights and keypads need to be added manually. This is done by configuring the integration after it has been added.

Actions

Action send_command

Send a custom command to the Lutron Homeworks controller.

Data attribute Optional Example Description
controller_id No homeworks The controller to which the command should be sent to.
command No KBP, [02:08:02:01], 1 The command you want to send. This can either be a single command or a list of commands. In addition to the commands supported by the controller, the special command DELAY <ms> is supported, where ms is the number of milliseconds to sleep.

Sending a list of commands

The example shows how to send KBP, wait 0.5 seconds, then send KBR to simulate a keypad button keypress with a duration of a half second.

action: homeworks.send_command
data:
  controller_id: "homeworks"
  command:
    - "KBP, [02:08:02:01], 1"
    - "DELAY 500"
    - "KBR, [02:08:02:01], 1"