This is an interesting thread. I'm (finally) about to move into a new house that will be very IoT heavy. The thing that surprises me about this thread is that SmartThings seems to be working well for everyone. I've had ST since Kickstarter, and have the 2.0 hub, but I still don't really get along with it. Being honest, I've not messed with it for a long time now, as I'd resigned myself to not have an app to 'glue' everything together. Instead, I've got iPads built into the walls in various locations, on the basis that the native app will provide the best experience, even if it's not integrated. IFTTT will do most of that work, although the latency can be a pain sometimes. In broad terms, I'm using Nest for environmental (stats and Protects), Unifi for security and infrastructure (CCTV, network/wifi), Abode for alarm, Sonos for audio and Plum for lighting. Mixed into that is Haiku Home for some other lighting and fans, Hue, Harmony, Alexa, Blossom, August, Ring, Nanoleaf, Bloomsky, Axis, Neurio, MyQ, and probably a few other things I've forgotten about or haven't got around to setting up. So I'd be interested in any other recommendations to tie all this stuff together, or if others are taking the app-based approach, and giving up on the glue to tie it together. I'm a Homeseer veteran, but don't have the time or skills to get back into that level of effort. Sorry if this is taking things a little OT...
I'm interested, and surprised, at the number of components that folk are mixing & matching. I'm a programmer by trade, and my experience of 99% of all the integrations we have done has always seemed to end in tears ... Perhaps in the HA field the EDIs work well? I'm also interested to hear what folk hope to get out of HA. I can do toys-for-the-boys with the best of them, but on this I 100% agree with Wifee : "When you are away it must still JUST WORK". So my aspirations are modest, but I'd be happy to consider widening them. Mostly what I want is better modelling of house response to temperature so that it will handle climate control inputs better. Under floor heating is an example. Thermostat is useless - the response time of the floor is approaching days, rather than hours. The house needs relatively minuscule amounts of heat, so running it hard for a few hours would turn the place into a sauna. What I want is to run the floor 24/7 at just a few degrees above room temperature, but to vary the UFH water temperature based on the weather forecast - e.g. if forecast is turning cold then turn up the water temperature slightly. I'm happy to program it ... but the monitoring and control systems I have are way too proprietary to allow that to happen.
I rarely need to use the app to control anything, if I do need to control an appliance. I just tell Siri to do it as I intergrated my Nest and SmartThings system with HomeKit. The new Ring Elite looks interesting....finally PoE support!! I wish the Nest Cam Outdoor were also PoE, I got 8 of those for surveillance
I used these: GE Smart Dimmer, Z-Wave, In-Wall, 12724, Works with Amazon Alexa, 12724 - Wall Dimmer Switches - Amazon.com They've worked out really well for me.
Dunno if it is a suitable answer for you? but we have a generator socket on the outside of the house. Regulations here require that a house powered by generator etc. is disconnected from the grid (so power cannot flow back into the grid and give a linesman, repairing the fault, a shock). So we have a cut-over switch which toggles power between the Utility and the Generator. We have PV but that only works when there is power. So if we run the generator we also get PV (when the sun is shining natch!) One thing we should have done, but didn't, was to set up "critical circuits". Our generator is small and will power essentials, but not the cooker! and not all sorts of stuff on at once. So we have to carefully turn a bunch of stuff off before we engage the generator. If we had structured the wiring so that only one of the distribution boards was activated by the generator, and all critical circuits were served by that board, things would be a lot easier. But over here we only get a major power outage once every few years (I don't bother to get the generator out until power has been off for 6-ish hours). We had a fault on our supply recently (only effected us) and the Utility bought a monster generator out and parked it in our drive within a couple of hours ... for a minor storm we might be out 6 hours, major storm could be out for days if we are unlucky with what has been brought down; that's the occasion I would use the generator. But I'd need to run it ... to charge the car ... to drive and get more Gas though
Interesting. I'm using insteon, but after 10 years I'm starting to get button failures. I don't see the feature set in the manual, just install guides. Does it have a minimum on level?
I have some of those around the house and it's connected to my SmartThings system. Did anyone try the ZigBee version?
I installed ~60 of these. There's pro's and con's to them, Pro's are that they look cool, almost have Alexa support, and are very configurable. Cons are price, no IFTTT yet, and they seem to have a very small dev team. Responsive, but small.
Do you think that variations on the "Prepare the car for a long trip tomorrow leaving at 7AM" theme would be doable? I'm definitely up for that. Very interesting, thanks for that. Here are some of mine in case of interest: Party mode. Turns on all the lights we like to have on when we have a party. Corridors, Loo, outside lights, and so on. Hard to turn off lights. Some switch-plates have quite a few buttons and things like Exterior lights have a button on several switch-plates. Functions like that should not be turned off by accident - they are on for a reason and it would be easy for [visiting] people to turn them off whilst trying to achieve something or other. So all such things require push-and-hold (the legend on the switch includes a symbol to indicate that fact - if you know what it is there for!) All off. We have a number of "all off" switches (all are push-and-hold functions so not done by accident, plunging everyone into darkness!). By the door from extension into main house (turns off all downstairs lights in the extension), bottom of stairs [the "upstairs" button has push-and-hold to turn off everything upstairs except bedrooms], top of stairs ["downstairs" button has push-and-hold to turn off everything downstairs (would only be used by a person also setting the night alarm circuit)], and main bedrooms can turn off all upstairs corridor lights. Generally we don't have any switches in the corridors. There is a button on the switch-panel inside the room which turns on the corridor light - so if you are coming out of a room, and the corridor is in darkness, you can turn that on before you leave the room you are in. Dinning room has "kitchen" switch too - i.e. all lights to get down the corridor to the kitchen We stayed with some friends, years ago, who had HA lighting; first time I'd seen HA for real. We all went to bed, Wifee and I sitting in bed reading ... all of a sudden the lights went out! Host had pushed the "all off" button in his room. So I decided not to have mine do that, we only turn off upstairs corridor lights on a master-switch. Switches in family bedrooms [by bed] which will turn on every light in the house (except other bedrooms). Handy if spooked at night, particularly for the kids if they are house sitting (I say kids ... they're pretty grown up now ...) All upstairs lights off at 10AM. Every time we have a house full of other people's kids they seem to have been taught to get up without opening any curtains, and that its OK to just leave the room without turning the lights off! So I now have a solution for that "Pathway switches". We have a number of doors from the garden into the house (as well as the main entrances). All have "pathway" switches which turn on all the lights to the primary objective - usually the kitchen, but we also have one for "bed" when going in the other direction. So you can be chatting away to friends out on the terrace until after dark, come in with your arms full of dirty plates / whatever, and press that one switch to then be able to walk right through to the kitchen. Front door exit. Leaving for work at 5:30AM there are other people in the house, not up yet. In Winter its nice to be able to turn the lights in the house off, but still be able to see to get to the car and if need be to double back into the house for something forgotten. We have an "exit timer" switch by the door. It turns off all upstairs and downstairs corridor lights, and kitchen etc. (likely to have been in there to grab a coffee), and after a few minutes turns off the hall lights and the ones just outside the front door. (We also have a Vacation button when we are actually exiting the house; that starts a "fake occupancy" program). "Scenes". Our kitchen and living area have umpteen (I'm guessing 20) circuits - top lights, LED strips, cupboard hi-lights, all sorts - and they would be a nightmare to operate with a bank of old fashioned dimmers .... Our solution has been to have just 3 buttons with labels like "On/Off", "Cooking" and "Evening". They are basically just three separate scene programs; I can adjust them from my phone, which I did in the early days until we got them to a style we liked, but I haven't adjusted them since. They provide an "Everything on" mode and then two other hi/lo-light scene settings. By the by, we decided to use top button for On/Off rather than the suggestion of our installer of separate On and Off buttons (this to be consistent for visitors to easily master and similar to old-style on/off rocker switches). On panels with two columns of buttons we have assigned them so that the left column controls things to the left, and the right column things to the right. If the outside door is to the right of the switch then the right column would be things that are outside. If there is an internal door to the right of the switch then the right column is "things through that door" and the left column is "things in this room". Our thinking was to have a uniform system so that visitors wouldn't need training before they could figure out how to turn a light on!! In some rooms we have wired individual ceiling lights back to the control panel (rather than treating a group of lights as one circuit). We have then shorted all the wires into a single circuit at the controller. This is to allows us / future owners to break the wires apart and use more circuits for future needs. For example, we have changed some of the bedrooms so that the "Bathroom" switch, by the bed, just turns on one light (on that side of the bed, at a low intensity) and the bathroom light itself, so as not to disturb the person on the other side of the bed. So what was originally a single circuit of all ceiling lights has become three - one for the light on each side of the bed, and the third for all the rest of the ceiling lights. We have some table lights on dust-to-dawn. Basically a couple of lamps in corridors upstairs. This provides a consistent lighting, all night, 365 days a year. So for anyone checking the house it looks the same whether we are at home or away. (We also have "vacation mode" that simulates occupancy, but the corridor lights are "all night, every night"). As mentioned earlier if the alarm trips (intruder or smoke) at night it brings on all the lights in the house so when I confront the burglar, stark naked, they will at least know what they are in for!! We have [overt] CCTV outside and also [covert] at a couple of specific locations inside when an intruder is likely to be looking up. If the worst happens I'd like to give the Boys-in-Blue some nice clear pictures Having typed all that I realise I no longer think about all the functions we use day-to-day, they've just become "normal", and it has reminded me that the Lighting system has a lot of uses - hardly any of which were part of the initial discussion of "possibilities" with the installer, at a time when Wifee and I were saying to each other "Why on earth would we need that" Apologies for long diatribe.
I installed UFH at my last UK house...loved it, but as you say, the stuff in the concrete takes hours to make a difference, although the upstairs was more akin to a radiator in terms of how long it took to make an impact. It's such a niche market I doubt anyone really has an IoT type solution that ties the manifold control to the weather forecast, occupancy, ambient temp etc. Might be a good business opportunity if you're handy with the code and hardware ;-)
I sense a "There's Something About Mary" bathroom scene joke there. "Frank and beans" or "Is that hair gel?"
Think at the next Tesla event or next time I sit next to a Tesla engineer or programmer I will ask about integrating Tesla app to support both Apple Home Kit and Amazon Echo. Tesla seriously needs to enable TouchID vs this lame password on the phone too.
If replying to me this is so it pulls the car out of the garage on command from Amazon Echo. Watch me control my Tesla with Amazon Echo
Thanks, that looks interesting, but from reading this thread, it looks like it might be a bit too complicated for me to get going. 10 years ago I would have had time to dig into something like this and learn it (as I did with Homeseer back in the day), but I think now I need something that's more UI based, and less CLI/code. I'll keep reading though.
Did anyone ever do anything on this front? I have a Control4 Home Automation system and I have hacked together a bit of an interface to my Tesla. I can start charging or turning on the climate by pressing a keypad in my house. This keypad has coloured LEDs and I have them provide feedback on charging status (charging, unplugged, stopped, completed) or climate status. Currently this is done through HTTP GETs in either direction that kicks off Python code on an Apache web server. I wouldn't mind turning this into a proper Control4 driver. Control4 drivers are written in Lua and I don't really have any experience in Lua but it shouldn't be too hard to get this all working. It might also be possible to do some geofencing operations as well.
I'm only using Google Home, Nest, and Hue, but I don't have a garage, so not much HomeLink can do for me anyway. I wouldn't mind having the ability to control charging and pre-conditioning functions through Google Home, and maybe GPS-aware to turn on the porch/driveway light.