New Home Automation Hardware Forum

[jay (support)]

We're happy to bring everyone yet another set of tools to help people navigate the difficult topic that is Home Automation and Indigo.

We've added a new Home Automation Hardware forum. This forum has several sub-forums arranged by hardware category/type. This forums is a little different than the other ones - users can't create new topics or new sub-forums. We do this so we can maintain naming consistency with categories and topics. When we feel there is enough discussion about a particular piece of hardware, we'll create a new topic for that device in the appropriate category. Users will be able to post on those topics. We've instituted some rules for this forum because we want to keep them as constructive as possible.

By categorizing specific devices and consistently naming the device specific topics, we hope to make it easier for users to find the types of devices that they're interested in that Indigo supports. Note that this forum is not meant as a definitive list of devices supported by Indigo - that's what our Device List is for. These forums are meant to be public discussion areas for devices that warrant such topics. It may be that eventually every device will have a topic - but we sorta doubt it will be necessary for all devices.

Along with this new forum, we've added some new specific wiki pages that are dedicated to getting the best experience using them with Indigo - so look to those pages when you're first setting up a device for guidance and tips on how to best use them with Indigo.

The other part of our three legged stool, as mentioned earlier, is the new Device List. This is a simple database of devices that Indigo supports. We have some high-level information about the devices there. You will also find links to the wiki page and forums (if they exist) for the device. And, in the wiki page and the forum topic we'll attempt to make sure that links are provided to the other areas.

All this linking will take some effort to maintain since not all devices will have the wiki and/or forum discussion thread. But we think this is one area where putting a little effort will go a long way in helping users get the best use from their devices in Indigo.

So, check out the Device List and the new Home Automation Hardware forum (and the wiki pages they link to). Let us know what you think (you can post in the Indigo 6 beta forum for the moment). Once we get Indigo 6 much closer to complete we'll be turning our attention to building out the forum and wiki. If you have some tips/tricks that would be useful for an existing device let us know about that as well.

And, thanks for making Indigo the premiere home automation server on the market.