Disappearing and invalid plugins

After years of using the various versions of Indigo, the time has come to switch to a more solid system. My problem with Indigo is the unsupported plugins. Plugins suddenly stop working and disappear (ie Evohome and Honeywell Evohome) and unusable plugins like P1 and RFCom. Also good examples are the various weather plugins which sometimes work but most often not. This makes the system very unreliable and basically unusable. There are no announcements and asking questions doesn't seem an option. It's very unfortunate, but I am at the point of giving up and switching to another solution.

There are no announcements and asking questions doesn't seem an option.

Is that aimed at the plugin developers, or at the product (eg Honeywell) developers?

My evohome plugin was abandoned because another user brought out a newer plugin that I believe is working to this day? From memory he registered with Honeywell as a partner under NDA so I couldn’t continue with mine without registering which was pointless.

Several users use weather plugins all day long; it’s nobody’s fault that the API owners remove access and prevent plugin devs continuing with their plugins, but DaveL17 has done his best to provide others, and he certainly can’t be accused of doing so silently and without announcement.

Maybe if you have specific queries, you’d like to post them here then we can help, because I certainly don’t recognise much of what you’re stating?

Pwter



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I used Peter’s Evohome plugin, and he kindly added Hot Water support before he retired it due to the official one which Continues to work perfectly. As for the weather plugins the issue would apply to any HA platform as they have gone due to the providers closing their free API’s and changing business models which would be the same regardless of the tool you use.

I know many commercial providers who have much lower service levels than you see on here and not sure unreliable falls into my experience.

Have you raised any questions that have not been answered ?

If you think you can find a more feature rich, more stable home automation platform, god speed. I don't believe there is one. What you see as a weakness, I see as one of Indigo's greatest strengths. But let's not forget, developers are providing these plugins for free. I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I do bristle a little bit when folks suggest that others' essentially no-cost, volunteer efforts aren't up to their standards.

With respect to weather plugins, if you're referring to either the WUnderground plugin or the Fantastic Weather plugin, you couldn't possibly be more frustrated than me. That's a lot of my time and effort down the tubes. But rather than spend time writing another custom plugin to support another API that will surely be shut down at some point--I'm focusing those efforts on "universal" support through the GhostXML plugin.

At some point, I may write a weather shim plugin that will allow users to refer to it for weather data -- for triggers, actions, control pages and so on -- and use any source they wish. In that way, transitioning to a new data source would be as simple as revising a device setting.

[jay (support)]

We take all feedback quite seriously so I'd like to clarify some things you said.

After years of using the various versions of Indigo, the time has come to switch to a more solid system. My problem with Indigo is the unsupported plugins. Plugins suddenly stop working and disappear (ie Evohome and Honeywell Evohome) and unusable plugins like P1 and RFCom.

Others have addressed the Honeywell situation so I won't repeat. If you're talking about the P1Meter plugin, that developer put out a new release in October and if there are issues with it I'm pretty sure he would address them. However, I am mostly quite curious about the issues you have with the RFXCOM plugin - can you specify why it's unusable? I'm using it for humidity sensors at the moment and it works fine for me. I know we have quite a few users using it for a wide range of things and we haven't heard of anyone saying that it's unusable. So some specifics would be super helpful.

Also good examples are the various weather plugins which sometimes work but most often not. This makes the system very unreliable and basically unusable.

Others have addressed the weather plugins - it's unfortunate that the companies providing weather data seem to be fickle about supplying that data, but it's hardly something that you can blame on plugin developers. Do you have examples of other weather data sources that your new platform uses which is "reliable"?

There are no announcements and asking questions doesn't seem an option. It's very unfortunate, but I am at the point of giving up and switching to another solution.

This is the one that I'm having the most trouble with. I've searched the forums and there are only 2 topics you've posted on and both of those seem to have resolutions on them. I've searched our support email database and find no emails from your email address. So I'm not understanding why asking questions isn't an option. We strive to provide the best support in our industry so clarification here would be extremely helpful, particularly since you seem to be frustrated enough to switch platforms.

We value all customers and want to continually improve so any further feedback would be very very helpful.

The grass is always greener on the other side as they say. I did have a serious investigation into replacing indigo* but honestly I didn’t find anything better. Sure there’s some that have some fancy features or masses of user contributions, but some even simple tasks end up being 5x more complicated than on indigo. And not to mention that there’s lots of abandoned plugins for those systems for much the same reasons as here.

*Don’t worry Jay I was gonna bring you with me. You don’t get to escape.


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These are the errors I get with P1meter and the Evohome plugin. The latter worked fine for a long time. When I said there is no possibility about asking questions, I was referring to my specific issues, ie the P1meter.

Honeywell Error [Thu Jan 7 18:53:42 2021] Error: Cannot authenticate to TCC EMEA API. Retrying in 60...
P1Meter Error Error in plugin execution runConcurrentThread:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "plugin.py", line 348, in runConcurrentThread
File "plugin.py", line 317, in readtelegram
File "plugin.py", line 477, in read_one_packet
File "plugin.py", line 616, in __init__
TypeError: int() argument must be a string or a number, not 'NoneType'

P1Meter Error plugin runConcurrentThread function returned or failed (will attempt again in 10 seconds)

I know these plugins are for free and I appreciate the amount of that goes into development, but bottomline, when they stop, they corrupt part of the whole system, actions, tiggers etc.

[matt (support)]

It sounds like you've already moved on from Indigo, but if you haven't did you see the last two posts here? That user had the exact same error you had for the Honeywell Evohome plugin ("Cannot authenticate to TCC EMEA API") and was able to get it working again.

And did you upgrade to the latest release of the P1Meter plugin (released just last October)?