Z-Wave home automation again...

Folks wanted feedback...

Well, the easiest way to describe this is: Welcome to 1995.

OK hardware, shame about the software - and we have a dozen competing systems that are all crap.

I sent back a VeraLite under the DSR (whatever...) because it was buggy and unstable. Gave it quite a hard "go", on the forums, reflashing firmware, everything.

I've tried the linux "version" of HomeSeer Hometroller but that's a clusterfuck of a Mono monstrosity where it eventually starts but mysteriously several bits of the web menus don't work and noone knows why... No sure whether to trust taking a punt on the RasberryPi version (the Zee).

I'm still trying to join the Fibaro forums - but after a week, the "admin" has completely failed to approve my registration.... And I'm reading stuff like, and I quote from the forum:

"It's all VERY buggy. I also see from many other posts everything is rather "hope it works" rather than it does. As a software engineer I stop adding "new features" and fix all known bugs then proceed. This software as is (any version!) is unusable!! "

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Looked at RazBerry (Pi) - that seems to be a very raw gateway that needs something else to add the interface and smartness.

The interface is choosable - there's Openremote (which it seems is not limited to the Pi, but can also drive a directly connected Z-Stick (USB dongle) and other gateways. This looks interesting, but could be best described as:

Not quite a Mecchano set. More like a sheet of metal with a set of saws, files and drills supplied...

That's not intended as any disrespect to what looks like a very solid project - it just knocks it out of the "ready to go" running...

I think I will take a punt on the Fibaro Lite - it's not expensive, I've got 14 days to send it back and I know what to expect, so I should be able to ascertain "works or not works" pretty quickly...

Such a shame - there must be a dozen tangential efforts - it would be better perhaps if there were 4. Two commercial and two at most OpenSource. Then stuff might get done and there's be some pretty healthy but tightly linked competition.

Considering X10 has been around forever, I am very surprised that the outside web interface and control logic has not been well and truly cracked by now - leaving a generalisation of the back end to add in other protocols...

Reply to
Tim Watts
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That's depressing...

Are you able to tell if the firmware in the hardware is robust? If it's 'just' the software you run on a PC (or wherever) to control the units that's not quite so drastic. And I wonder for example whether there's in essence a command-line interface (or telnet or something) that you could use to send configuration settings to, and make queries of, such a device?

Maybe it's just terrible GUIs...?

If the web interface works by there being a web server implemented on the hardware units, then you're going to be out of luck if it's poor. But if the bulk of the logic is in the client maybe it's just that the client's not been updated each time the hardware's capabilities change...

That's not good...

It's great to hear that something might one day be "very solid", though...

Reply to
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts

I've been trying for a "small bit of hardware" as if this becomes useful, then it should be a black box and not at risk of being on a general purpose server suffering all manner of abuse and upgrades.

Pi's seem to be the hardware of choice, followed by some mini-ITX type box.

Obviously in a lot of cases the bottom end (network), middle end (logic and scheduling) and top end (gui) are often on the same device. But sometimes the top end is abstracted to either a "portal" (yuk) or to a separate application running on Eclipse (yuk) that "compiles" a design into some files to run on the backend.

Another one that looks quite interesting is:

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At least it has a manual of sorts and is written in a sensible language (C++) and not java (yuk) or .net/C# (puke)[1]

[1] Not that I don't respect C# but running anything on a xVM like a JVM or Mono is just adding to the fatness, slowness and number of things to go wrong (like never working IME).
Reply to
Tim Watts

Oh dear. Sounds like the industry has to mature somewhat. I wonder if the highly priced versions used in systems made by big companies for industrial use are better. it could be that once again the economy of the devices in general use has been software testing leave it to the user to complain. A few years ago I had several Pure radios lock up and stop working. After several versions, I eventually got onewith 1.2 version of software that seems to have fixed that bug, but there are others less radical, but if they know it was buggy why sell the damned items and replace them with the same bugged version several times? Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

I used homeseer to do some automation using X10 about six years ago. It had a web server library so you could create web pages and switch stuff on and off, etc. I didn't find it to be much of a problem.

Reply to
dennis

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