Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Posted on
Mon May 29, 2017 2:35 pm
howartp offline
Posts: 4559
Joined: Jan 09, 2014
Location: West Yorkshire, UK

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

gadgetnut wrote:
I'm following up to the earlier question, "Is it possible to have Simple Control send a variable to Indigo."

FlyingDiver wrote:
Is there some way to cause SimpleControl to do an HTTP request? If so, you can use the Indigo REST interface or my HTTPd plugin to set a variable.

Yes - see my post three above this one in which I told user hamw what do to.

Posted on
Mon May 29, 2017 4:27 pm
gadgetnut offline
User avatar
Posts: 137
Joined: Nov 03, 2005
Location: San Juan Islands

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Thanks, Joe and howartp. Simple Control has a command to "open a URL in Simple Control" which I have used in the past to open a webpage in Safari on the iOS device. I'm not familiar with coding placement or syntax and I'm hoping you guys can go a step further to help me out.

Let's say I created a variable in Indigo called "Actively Watching TV." I'd create schedules in Indigo such that if Actively Watching TV is false, the normal Interior Dusk activity group fires at the specified hour.

In order to make the Actively Watching TV variable True (and trigger the alternate "Interior Dusk Movie in Progress" action group,) which plugin should I install and what coding do I need to place (if any) and what URL should I tell Simple Control to open?

In a related vein, I suppose I would create a nightly scheduled event to modify the Actively Watching TV variable to false.

Thanks very much for your help!

Posted on
Mon May 29, 2017 11:51 pm
howartp offline
Posts: 4559
Joined: Jan 09, 2014
Location: West Yorkshire, UK

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

No worries.

If Joe doesn't get back before me, I'll reply properly tonight when I'm at my pc instead of phone.

It sounds like SimpleControl might have added new commands since I last looked, but whether they have or not, the URL you need is the one in my post above.

Change 192.168.1.1 for your Mac's IP address.

Create (or rename) your variable ActivelyWatchingTV variable without spaces. It'll make your testing easier; we can rename afterwards.

Change SprinklerLocationMultiplier to ActivelyWatchingTV

Change 1.23 to true

See if that gets you anywhere. I guess you'll need authentication somewhere in which case we'll play tonight.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Posted on
Tue May 30, 2017 11:58 pm
kelmk offline
Posts: 85
Joined: May 17, 2017

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

So simple remote added a way to control itself through HTTP via the simple hub app on the mac so it is possible to run simple remote commands from indigo! This opens up a massive database of supported devices to Indigo. I haven't tried it yet but it looks promising. Simple remote also supports indigo actions natively for some time.
https://forum.simplecontrol.com/post379 ... ync#p37913


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Posted on
Mon Nov 06, 2017 11:40 pm
koensayr offline
Posts: 90
Joined: Jul 10, 2013

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Any examples of actually using this? It would be huge for sure.

I love using Simple remote since it sort of makes making the control pages easy, and it does a great job of dealing with AV equipment, something which Indigo sort of lacks. (Unless you make custom control pages all over the place)

Posted on
Tue Dec 05, 2017 10:39 am
evansgo offline
Posts: 223
Joined: Nov 29, 2013

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

In case no-one knows where to put this. You need to select a room (i.e. NOT be at the top level Simple Home) then you can drag the activity to the left and you should see Edit and Delete options. Select Edit and you can then find the start commands section and Add command, then choose URL and type in the string you want.

In my case this works perfectly, as long as no authentication is ticked http://192.168.10.1:8176/variables/brig ... alue=false

Would someone remind me how to add user / password to this please?

I guess we could just create a device in Indigo to modify the variable and then use the existing built in commands to run it, but that feels like cheating to me :)

Thanks
Gareth

Posted on
Wed Dec 06, 2017 8:12 am
evansgo offline
Posts: 223
Joined: Nov 29, 2013

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

After a bit of tooing and froing the variable function is now working in Simple controller v5.06.

Select the indigo device, then .Variable Set. The use parameter 1 to tell indigo which variable (Capitals matter) and parameter 2 what you want to set it to. Its working fine for me.

Posted on
Sat Dec 16, 2017 8:33 pm
george99 offline
Posts: 224
Joined: May 27, 2015

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

I use Roomie/Simple for some devices. Denon AVRs especially since I have a ton of issues with Cynical Denon, which never works right.
I use the restful API. I have created several activities in roomie that are just designed for individual functions that indigo triggers. They work nicely together.

Unfortunately, my issues with Roomie are on the support side. The product is excellent, but the support is terrible. They have a user forum which is a joke, because every post is moderated prior to it showing up. So there is no real dialog. Often posts take days to get reviewed, and sometimes never make it to be live.
If you send them a support ticket, they answer you with one-line answers, and answer you once or twice a day, so it can take days to resolve a simple issue.

Someone should create a 3rd party roomie user forum that would actually make their product much better. They are just to narrow minded to realize it.

Posted on
Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:17 am
evansgo offline
Posts: 223
Joined: Nov 29, 2013

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

george99 wrote:
I use Roomie/Simple for some devices. Denon AVRs especially since I have a ton of issues with Cynical Denon, which never works right.
I use the restful API. I have created several activities in roomie that are just designed for individual functions that indigo triggers. They work nicely together.

Unfortunately, my issues with Roomie are on the support side. The product is excellent, but the support is terrible. They have a user forum which is a joke, because every post is moderated prior to it showing up. So there is no real dialog. Often posts take days to get reviewed, and sometimes never make it to be live.
If you send them a support ticket, they answer you with one-line answers, and answer you once or twice a day, so it can take days to resolve a simple issue.

Someone should create a 3rd party roomie user forum that would actually make their product much better. They are just to narrow minded to realize it.



I don't agree with you at all, to be fair to them they've been quite responsive and you're definitely not correct about posting on their forum. For the first one or two posts you are moderated (a good idea I expect), but once you have participated a little then you are promoted to 'basic' and are free to post instantly.

That instance of Indigo Variables being added took one message. Will answered in a few hours, then added the facility. I tried it, it didn't work and then a bit of back and forth (I assume he had no Indigo to test) between us and it was working, I could not imagine any better response to be honest, definitely not at that level of cost....
The only real negative is that I have found them to say 'Its working fine here', which was a little frustrating, and needed more prodding before they actually fixed the issue, but overall I think they are well above average.

Posted on
Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:14 pm
george99 offline
Posts: 224
Joined: May 27, 2015

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Don't get me wrong, they reply, but it's very hard to get a good thought thru answer out of them. Maybe Will the owner is better, but often I get the replies from Jon Lopez. Very short often canned replies.

As for the foum, don't go far. Compare it to this forum form Indigo. I have attempted to post several messages, nothing vulgar, nothing harsh, just questions, suggestions, etc, and post never shows up.
Just the other day when they released v5, I downloaded it and tried toying around with it. I couldn't figure something out, and I tried posting. Well for the first time, my message showed up, and Will's answer was basically "read the instructions", with a link to the marketing page. Not even a link to the instructions. Furthermore, the instructions are a book. Not just a page or two. I have been using Roomie for several years, and I just had a qustion about something.

Go look at the forum, there are very few posts at all there, because they make it very hard to have an open dialog like Indigo has.

On Friday, I found a bug in v5. I sent them a ticket. Still waiting for a reply. I know its the weekend. But just saying...

Posted on
Mon Dec 18, 2017 1:45 pm
george99 offline
Posts: 224
Joined: May 27, 2015

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Here you go as I posted. I contact them with a bug. I was very specific as to what the bug was.
Just got my useless answer back from them. They completely did not read what I wrote, and just gave me a half-assed response. Might even be canned.

This is what I wrote them:
Hi,
I have an activity that I have used prior to v5.
It uses my Denon avr main zone as the volume device, and I manually created buttons and a feedback to control the volume of zone 2 of the same AVR. It has always worked nicely.
However, in v5, the volume up/down controls for zone 2 are changing the volume for the main zone.
I double checked that they are set correctly. I recreated them, but it still happens.

From the z2 device control it works correctly. This problem only happens from within an activity.


This is the response I got which does not remotely address the issue, and actually shows that they didn't really read what I wrote.
Hello,

Please try disabling "Force Legacy Remote Design" for the activity if you have the enabled. Then go to Remote Design > Reset Design > Change Remote Design > set to None. Save to exit. Then relaunch that activity and test volume control.
Thank You,
Simple Control Support


With legacy turned off, the custom buttons that I built don't even show up. They know this, they even say this on their website. So legacy must be on. I never said volume doesn't work. I said the the controls for zone 2 were changing the volume of the main zone.

And this came from Jon Lopez as I mentioned in a previous post.

Posted on
Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:58 pm
jay (support) offline
Site Admin
User avatar
Posts: 18199
Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

OK guys, I understand that there are varied opinions but let's not turn this into a bash another company thread please. Let's just let it go with what's already posted, I believe everyone has gotten their points across.

Jay (Indigo Support)
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Posted on
Mon Dec 18, 2017 6:39 pm
Colorado4Wheeler offline
User avatar
Posts: 2794
Joined: Jul 20, 2009
Location: Colorado

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

I was a very early adopter of Roomie (now Simple) and was a fan at first, but I couldn't find enough flexibility with it to do what I wanted and thought the price was pretty steep for what you get. The one thing it did that I liked was the Apple TV remote and I used that extensively. Eventually I built everything into control pages and used that instead because, again, i thought that the recurring subscription was unjustified and outrageously high. As for support and the product, they both were always fine for me but as I find ways to simplify my home automation I find myself eliminating a number of 3rd party vendors that are not as efficient or optimized as I would like my HA to be.

My Modest Contributions to Indigo:

HomeKit Bridge | Device Extensions | Security Manager | LCD Creator | Room-O-Matic | Smart Dimmer | Scene Toggle | Powermiser | Homebridge Buddy

Check Them Out Here

Posted on
Mon Dec 18, 2017 8:02 pm
george99 offline
Posts: 224
Joined: May 27, 2015

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

Jay, I assure you that wasn't what I was trying to do. I actually LOVE Simple Control, I just really wish that they would make their support remotely as good as Indigo's is.
Their software works very well in tandem with Indigo (at least for my purposes).

Posted on
Tue May 11, 2021 3:43 pm
JaceJenkins offline
Posts: 51
Joined: Oct 16, 2015

Re: Anyone else into Roomie Remote? Some early impressions.

I wish Indigo could Control Roomie Activities.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests