- Posted on
Tue Mar 01, 2022 10:49 am
-
whmoorejr
offline
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- Posts: 763
- Joined: Jan 15, 2013
- Location: Houston, TX
I think it's going to boil down to personal preference.
I personally find indigo to be more flexible and better equipped at being the central hub of my automation.
I gravitated to Node-Red primarily for more reliable Alexa control. With the new native Alexa plugin, I don't use that feature anymore. The parts of node-red / alexa that indigo can't do, like music control and dynamic music selection, works on node-red, but it wasn't reliable when I used it.
As for logic, I do love the drag/drop node-red style for building a flow. I do, however, find indigo to be superior with more complex logic. Eg: If person A is home but not person B and it is between this time and button x is pressed then do 15 different things.
Another + for node-red is the ability to copy/paste a flow and to share a flow online with others.
As for node-red dashboard vs. indigo control pages.... I like the ease of building an indigo page, but a node red interface is a lot more customizable with iframes with more dynamic controls like volume bars, lists, etc. Personally though, I've steered away from crazy control pages and just have a main one that displays in my office. All my other control pages are now simple small pages that do one function.... like a "front door" control page that loads a fresh image from the front door camera and has a door lock/unlock button. <-- easy, loads fast.
For output, I'm moving more towards voice announcements (indigo -> alexa) & (indigo -> airfoil -> airplay) and personalized notifications (indigo -> pushover).
For input, I try to make complex logic in indigo to anticipate stuff (if front door opens and it's dark outside and patio light is off -> turn on patio light for 15 minutes) <-- so I don't need a control page switch with my patio light because it will come on when I need it to and if I need it on longer than 15 minutes, I just turn the physical switch on before opening the door which bypasses the trigger.
The bulk of the remaining automation is super simple automation that I use either Siri (home kit -> indigo) or Alexa (alexa -> indigo) and just control with voice.