Indigo Domotics

Alright, after a couple of weeks of running Indigo 6, I have a complaint. Indigo 6 works too well! It does what you program it to do, it has most functionality built in or easily available through scripting, and it never seems to crash or have problems.

But seriously, I'm used to spending my time troubleshooting problems or searching forums for solutions to issues, but I find that my current setup just works. This has to be one of the most stable, mature releases I've ever used. Awesome job!

Thanks. We can definitely use more complaints like this one.

Hi Seeker

I'm considering switching form HS to Indigo. I'm mostly z-wave. Would you find sharing your experiences and pros and cons of Indigo vs HS?

Thanks

Mark

mark_anderson_us wrote:

Hi Seeker

I'm considering switching form HS to Indigo. I'm mostly z-wave. Would you find sharing your experiences and pros and cons of Indigo vs HS?

Thanks

Mark

I'd love to evangelize!

I have been using Homeseer since about 1999 when it was known as Keware. I have a very low registration number. Great product, but Windows is its worst enemy. HS2 finally became somewhat stable after a ROUGH transition. Never tried HS3, but I do follow the boards on it.

I bought a ton of Radio Shack clearance Z-wave modules at 90% off a couple of years ago. Upgrading to HS Pro/touch was too pricey at the time, so I bought a vera. It got me started with z-wave and works fairly well. Z-wave reliability became an issue with Vera, and I was losing devices every few days. Constant maintenance.

Last summer I bought a mac mini, a z-troller, and Indigo. Indigo is so pleasant to use. It is rock solid. To my knowledge, I've never had a crash.

Z-wave (z-troller) is also amazing with Indigo. I never have to touch it. I have about 30 z-wave devices and it runs flawlessly.

I also use 3 sonos zone players, a DSC alarm, and netatmo weather extensively. I have been able to do anything I have wanted to do very easily.

Cons? I still have to leave my Vera on the network (interfaced using the vera bridge plugin) to control my 4 z-wave locks. this work pretty well, but I don't think all functionality is available to Indigo. Example, notify if a bad pin is entered is not passed to Indigo to my knowledge. But locked/unlocked and battery status are visible.

Not much else negative to add. I'm thrilled mainly because my system just works and I can spend my time doing productive things, not debugging. Just browse the forums. You won't find the level of bugzilla reports that I see on the HS and vera forums.

If you want any other specific experiences, I'll be glad to share!

Seeker wrote:

mark_anderson_us wrote:

Hi Seeker

I'm considering switching form HS to Indigo. I'm mostly z-wave. Would you find sharing your experiences and pros and cons of Indigo vs HS?

Thanks

Mark

I'd love to evangelize!

I have been using Homeseer since about 1999 when it was known as Keware. I have a very low registration number. Great product, but Windows is its worst enemy. HS2 finally became somewhat stable after a ROUGH transition. Never tried HS3, but I do follow the boards on it.

I bought a ton of Radio Shack clearance Z-wave modules at 90% off a couple of years ago. Upgrading to HS Pro/touch was too pricey at the time, so I bought a vera. It got me started with z-wave and works fairly well. Z-wave reliability became an issue with Vera, and I was losing devices every few days. Constant maintenance.

Last summer I bought a mac mini, a z-troller, and Indigo. Indigo is so pleasant to use. It is rock solid. To my knowledge, I've never had a crash.

Z-wave (z-troller) is also amazing with Indigo. I never have to touch it. I have about 30 z-wave devices and it runs flawlessly.

I also use 3 sonos zone players, a DSC alarm, and netatmo weather extensively. I have been able to do anything I have wanted to do very easily.

Cons? I still have to leave my Vera on the network (interfaced using the vera bridge plugin) to control my 4 z-wave locks. this work pretty well, but I don't think all functionality is available to Indigo. Example, notify if a bad pin is entered is not passed to Indigo to my knowledge. But locked/unlocked and battery status are visible.

Not much else negative to add. I'm thrilled mainly because my system just works and I can spend my time doing productive things, not debugging. Just browse the forums. You won't find the level of bugzilla reports that I see on the HS and vera forums.

If you want any other specific experiences, I'll be glad to share!

Thanks Seeker!

Sounds like you're using a lot of what I'm using..Just started trial and second z-stick arrives tomorrow, so I can play with some z-wave devices without taking my entire HS system down.

Don't use the plugin myself but I would assume you could use the "Insert device state into variable" Action and
use the variables to show the states.

Carl

The only attributes that show up for locks via vera plugin are on, off, and battery. insert to variable won't work (I'm pretty sure). It is possible to pass device states using python. I still use the find iPhone vera plugin because it is simple and works flawlessly. I get the status via a schedule every minute. It has never failed. So I could probably take this route to get more lock info if I wanted.

On a side note, after all my praise, I had my first failure last night. Not a failure of Indigo, however. I was away and I got some eyezon sms messages about power failure/power restored. Indigo came back up fine and I could connect, but none of my wave was working. I got in late and had to power cycle the z-troller (unplug, remove batteries) to get it to even show signs of life. It started working immediately. Probably not much way around something like this other than plugging the z-troller into the UPS sitting right by it.