This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
Bye Bye Vera
So... after 6 years of loyal service (well sort off) today i'm happy to report that i'm about to unplug my Vera lite.
To be honest 3 months ago i did not know if this day would ever come.
To understand what i'm talking about you have to understand the following. My house is build in the 70ties by some crazy builders who thought it to be a great idea to put lights on the walls and light switches on the ceilings.
My solution 6 years ago, was to put new power points on the ceillings and control all the lights via KaKu. For everyone thinking of making that mistake, don't KaKU sucks it is not reliable in any way.
So a few weeks i replaced everything with Zwave switches and dimmers and bought a Vera resulting in over 30 Zwave devices. Most of them Fibaro dimmers and switches, but also some smoke detectors and a few sensors, 4 KaKU devices.
So every light in my house is controlled by Zwave or KaKU (in lack of zwave battery powered wall switches), the pump of my floorheating is controled by Zwave even my ventilation system does not work without Zwave. Without a working controler i'm literally running from a verry angry wife in a dark, cold house growing mushrooms on the ceilling of my bathroom because there is no ventilation at all.
Vera has been a downright diva from time to time, from waking up everyone in the house by turning it into a disco at 3 o clock at night. by randomly wiping all Zwave devices and refusing to turn on lights. But to be honestly, overall she took good care of my house the last couple of years. At least i did know what to expect of her.
I pre-ordered homey to replace Vera but, homey, well homey is young and flashy but... still had a LOT to learn. Because he did not speak Zwave properly and was not stable in any way, he has been sitting idle for a long time. The last couple of weeks however i started to notice that most of my devices were now supporterd and those that were not, i was able to write a driver for myself. So after spending day's of unscrewing wall switches, rebuilding flows i'm now at the point that all devices in Vera look like this:
My use for homey is purely as a home control unit. i don't want to speak to it, i don't want it to speak to me, it must just shutup and turn the lights on when i come home or push a light switch. And most important of all, my wife must not notice its there.
I don't want to jinx it, but i have to say homey does now everything Vera did and a little more, its more easy to setup and works like charm.
So i'm verry verry happy right now.
Just one thing that would make me even more happy and that is if there was a way to make a backup of homey's config because i don't want to go true the inclusion proces of zwave devices again......It's a pain...
To be honest 3 months ago i did not know if this day would ever come.
To understand what i'm talking about you have to understand the following. My house is build in the 70ties by some crazy builders who thought it to be a great idea to put lights on the walls and light switches on the ceilings.
My solution 6 years ago, was to put new power points on the ceillings and control all the lights via KaKu. For everyone thinking of making that mistake, don't KaKU sucks it is not reliable in any way.
So a few weeks i replaced everything with Zwave switches and dimmers and bought a Vera resulting in over 30 Zwave devices. Most of them Fibaro dimmers and switches, but also some smoke detectors and a few sensors, 4 KaKU devices.
So every light in my house is controlled by Zwave or KaKU (in lack of zwave battery powered wall switches), the pump of my floorheating is controled by Zwave even my ventilation system does not work without Zwave. Without a working controler i'm literally running from a verry angry wife in a dark, cold house growing mushrooms on the ceilling of my bathroom because there is no ventilation at all.
Vera has been a downright diva from time to time, from waking up everyone in the house by turning it into a disco at 3 o clock at night. by randomly wiping all Zwave devices and refusing to turn on lights. But to be honestly, overall she took good care of my house the last couple of years. At least i did know what to expect of her.
I pre-ordered homey to replace Vera but, homey, well homey is young and flashy but... still had a LOT to learn. Because he did not speak Zwave properly and was not stable in any way, he has been sitting idle for a long time. The last couple of weeks however i started to notice that most of my devices were now supporterd and those that were not, i was able to write a driver for myself. So after spending day's of unscrewing wall switches, rebuilding flows i'm now at the point that all devices in Vera look like this:
My use for homey is purely as a home control unit. i don't want to speak to it, i don't want it to speak to me, it must just shutup and turn the lights on when i come home or push a light switch. And most important of all, my wife must not notice its there.
I don't want to jinx it, but i have to say homey does now everything Vera did and a little more, its more easy to setup and works like charm.
So i'm verry verry happy right now.
Just one thing that would make me even more happy and that is if there was a way to make a backup of homey's config because i don't want to go true the inclusion proces of zwave devices again......It's a pain...
Comments
Hope she will do great work for you and makes it past the 6 years vera did
So you included the Fibaro modules manually? I've read somewhere that you can do a migration from Vera to Homey (for non battery operated devices). This is the option I want to go for.
What's your expierience with the Homey flows vs the Vera scene's? Is it already possible to have multiple triggers to start a flow? This is what I like about my Vera scene's.
I'll post some feedback when I start my migration from Vera to Homey... in a couple of weeks.
Since the remake of Zwave support in homey i did not manage to include homey anymore in the vera network nor have i read about automated migration. Automated migration seems unlikely to me since you are migrating to a differend zwave chip / device. If that was possible it would be a serious security risk. So yes i have excluded all the modules and reincluded them with homey.
As for flows.
Personaly i never been a big fan of the scenes in Vera. They were always very basic (Trigger - Result) unless you started to use PLC, LTS or PLEG apps or of course wrote your own logic in LUA. And to be honest i found those solutions a pain to setup.
I haven't done a whole lot of flows in homey but from what i have seen i think its mainly differend but the end result is the same or better.
For example unlike with vera you can only trigger a flow on one event / state / device. But you can organise flows in groups and call a flow within a flow. So for example one could make a flow called "fire"to process one of the smoke detectors going off (send a message turn on lights the lot), and for each smoke detector he could just make a small second flow that calls the "Fire" flow. Because you can create groups to organise the flows it does not get a big mess and duplicating a flow is just one click.
What i like about the flows in homey is that you make most flows just from the gui because its a 3 step rocket. One trigger, one or more conditions that can be evaluated after the flow is triggered and some results. For the triggers and conditions you can use virtualy every variable known to homey. Wich makes it accesible for people without programming experience.
I haven't found a way to run a piece of code like you could with Vera. But there are apps like better logic that allow you to define custom variables witch you can change within flows and you can call IFTTT and HTTP requests form the gui so i think for most situations there realy is no need for running custom code. And if you find yourself without a solution writing and installing a custom app for homey isn't that hard to be honest.
What i'm still searching for is a way to write retrieve data from a MYSQL database. there must be ways to do this true http requests but it would be a lot easyer to just be able to write a MYSQL query and run it.
And i miss the backup feature for the Zwave network like Vera had. If something happens to homey (and i'm on the beta build so it will) i now risk having to start building my Zwave network from scratch again. And i don't look forward to that.
When Athom fixes this, I can finally switch off my Vera3.
In the meantime, @Priknr1 released his Horstmann / Secure app to the App Store... I'm sure he is able to contribute to helping you to switch off your Vera
I have built an app for the SRT321 and the HRT4-ZW
If you need support on another thermostat, please add it to homey, and find the Manufacturer ID, Device Type ID, and Device ID for me.
As for the IPCAM, you could install homeydash. It is a dashboard to control homey (homey app alternative) and in this dashboard, you can also add a webcam videostream