kohai

I'm curious on this too as I'm juggling 3 remotes currently (tivo, harman/kardon receiver, and roku) and I've looked at the logitech offerings and haven't been too wowed.

As someone new to messing with home automation (HA), I think the first challenge for people to is to understand the "why" of doing HA. For me, at first, I would look at some of the products in the market and be unexcited. Turning on lights from my phone doesn't excite me. So, I think each person has to find the "why" of HA for them. The other day I set up our entry light to come on when the door opens. I got that working and while my wife knew I was playing with it, she didn't get the "ah ha" moment until she came in one evening and the light came one automatically and she was happy to not trip over the kids shoes on the floor in the dark. She has asked me to change a few things with the lighting system to add ease-of-use. For example, she was always complaining my kids would leave the lights on in their rooms when they went to school and she would have to go upstairs and check all the lights. Now I have one button downstairs she can push to turn off all of the lights upstairs and she is happy every time she doesn't have to climb the stairs. (I've been thinking I could probably put a sensor up there to detect when the kids are gone.) Once someone starts to understand the advantages of HA and what can be done, they start to come up with all sorts of new ideas. I think HA is kind of like one of those things you didn't know you wanted or needed until you had it and then you wouldn't give it up. Like heated seats in the car in the winter, a Tivo, Netflix, a bidet, etc. So the implementation must be something of value. I like the automated side of things. Like knowing in advance when something is wrong. Things I'm playing with: - Lighting system control/scenes - using my alarm system sensors to trigger the lighting system based on door/motion sensors - measuring temperature of freezer and door open alerts (lost 1/2 a pig when the door didn't get closed) - I've got some sump pumps I need to figure out how to monitor nicely. Had two die but caught it in time. - having my doorbell queue a message over my whole-house sound system (via sonos) - need to get around to figuring out some window blind control So, I think from a business stand point, the challenge is to sell the "why" of HA. The "how" is secondary. I like that the ISY can be remotely configured via the portal so service companies like yourself can offer after-install support to people.

Not to hijack this thread, but I've got a similar if/then/else question. My scenario: 1. IF the front door is opened, turn on the chandelier. 2. Only turn OFF the light if the front door is closed AND there isn't any motion inside for 2 minutes. (e.g. if I invite someone in and close the door because it is cold I don't want the light to turn off on me) I created the following: The problem this has is that the ELSE is always being queued when the inside motion sensor triggers. If I'm inside the house and I have the chandelier ON, then it will turn it OFF 2 minutes after sensing motion (because the door isn't open too). I don't see a way to do an embedded IF inside the ELSE. Programmatically, I don't know the state of the chandelier -- I don't know if it is On or Off. Maybe in the future I'll create a really awesome Centralite interface to ISY. I can only tell it to go on or off.

I think the next day they reversed their decision due to backlash: http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/philips-hue-reverses-decision-to-block-third-party-light-bulbs/ I wouldn't be surprised to see them try a different angle at it down the road.

Thanks for this. I've read through the polyglot stuff and it was pretty technical -- this is easier to understand.

Interesting, I guess that makes sense... kind of like a WHILE but different.

This concept of the IF being evaluated again during the processing of the THEN seems so weird to me. I don't think I've run into a programming language that does that because often in the THEN statement you modify variables that make the IF no longer true (like a counter).

What do you guys use the data for? Is it triggering something?

I think there is a steep learning curve with home automation. Often instructions are written for people that are familiar with it and that is frustrating to us newbies. I used to do a lot of system administration and was always very annoyed when I ran into a problem and the error message said "Please contact your system administrator." That was me and I didn't know the answer! I'm trying to get my Centralite lighting system setup to talk to my ISY and the instructions are definitely written for someone that already has experience with the system (RS232 serial connection, yep). I've just discovered that when the previous home owner finished the basement, they put a different Centralite system in the basement. Doh. Now my main floor is one system that is hard wired (Centralite Elegance) and the basement is another system based on Zigbee (Centralite Jetstream). I'm messing with z-wave so I think I'm going to end up needing to connect two lighting systems into my ISY. And, I end up with zigbee and z-wave in the same house which I read is doable. blah blah blah. That's a long way of saying things get complicated fast and I'm a newbie. I think I fall into the camp of wanting to automate things but not wanting to just do things on my phone that I can already do (e.g. I don't need to turn the lights on from my phone but I may want the entry light to turn on automatically when someone rings the doorbell). The more I play around with it, the more ideas I get on how to use it. I started out with just a couple "nice to have" things but my list is getting a bit longer. I started with a doorbell, water sensors, and freezer temperature. Now I'm finding other ideas that will be neat.

If you have a linux box or raspberry pi on your network you could use nmap to scan the network for anything with an open port 80 (web server). example (change your ip subnet to match your network) nmap -p 80 192.168.1.0/24 If you have a debian based linux you can install nmap via: sudo apt-get install nmap

I'm a newbie too in the last week or so. I think home automation is a pretty technical hobby. I looked at Smartthings and others and saw that all of the controllers were requiring programming to do what I want to do -- that isn't unique to ISY. To my newbie eyes reading the forums for competing controllers, it was clear that people are sharing their programs and ways to do things. I didn't see a flexible controller that was preprogrammed to do everything with little effort. I want flexibility and with that comes a bit of complexity. I see the ISY as an aggregator of tools/platforms. If you want to do Insteon you can do that. If you want to have a z-wave lock, then you can do that too with your ISY (at the same time you are doing Insteon). If something is reaching across the network (e.g. sonos), you can program that to do things. This past weekend I've been playing with python queuing my sonos to play a doorbell chime (and resume playing music as applicable). I've got it functioning and will share my script when I clean it up. For most sonos use, the sonos app on my phone is much more convenient. I only need to interact with it from the ISY when I want it to do something in an automated fashion.