rccoleman

That's a good tip. Last night, I tried to turn on my whole house fan with "Alexa, turn on the fan" and it gave me the typical "there are several devices with that name..." line. It turns out that it heard "turn on the fans" (with an "s"), and it couldn't figure out what I wanted. I have exactly one device called "fan", so there's really no excuse for it not to be able to figure it out. Not being able to understand a word is one thing, but being unable to deduce intent in a case like that just seems silly. I do have 1 Google Home device and I've never had it misunderstand me, but I use it less often than the Dots spread around the house.

Presumably he means that he hit the set button again to take it out of linking mode (you actually have to hit it twice to exit), and further pushes of the set button don't toggle the responder or change the state. At least that's how I interpret it based on how the old motion sensors work.

Yeah, I got something similar from support. I've been meaning to re-do the voice training to see if it helps, but I haven't gotten around to it yet (it takes a while). For what it's worth, I find eKeyPad to be much faster than Mobillinc from app launch->turn a device on or off. It takes a few seconds for Mobilinc to check my devices and sync status before I can do anything, while eKeypad is ready to go almost immediately. Echo used to be faster and better than both of them because it's easier to walk and speak than walk and type, but the tide is turning. Now, I really need to stop in front of my Echo and speak directly at it to have a good chance of it understanding me. Rob

I'd almost prefer that it just beeped or buzzed or something so that I can try again without having to pretend like I'm having a conversation with a robot. Once it misunderstands, it takes so long to recover that I might as well keep walking until I hit the next Dot/Echo and try again. For some reason, swearing at it doesn't make it reconsider what I said

I've been getting that *a lot* lately, and it's gotten worse recently. Things that used to work very well, like "turn on morning", "turn on night", "turn on the fan", etc. are now misinterpreted and give me the "A few things share that name, which one did you want?". When I look at the history in the Alexa app, it's almost always because it misunderstood what I said - last night it heard "family" instead of "fan", despite the fact that the audio recording sounded fine. I've been religiously saying "no, it didn't do what I wanted" in the Alexa app when this happens, but it's not clear if it's doing any good. I think it's now more predisposed to hear "light" than it was before, and there's a 50/50 chance that my "turn on night" will be interpreted as "turn on light", followed by the "a few things share that name..."

Right. I recall from the launch that the Ecobee 4 Alexa support didn't work with the new ESP (echo spatial perception) feature that causes only the nearest device to respond. If you have an Echo or Dot nearby, it's hard to see the value of the Alexa support in the E4, and the E4 in general (over the E3).

Michel said that they were going to do it, but I don't know if it's happened yet.

Presumably, giesen means "secure communication link to the lock", which is lacking from Insteon solutions (and Insteon protocol in general), but supported by most (all?) ZWave locks.

My HomeKit use case is pretty simple - display a widget on the Today page and in the control center to show the status of my locks and alarm and to control them easily with tap. For that, HomeBridge on an RPI3 is working fine for me, so ISY supporting HomeKit would just simplify that installation. Configuring HomeBridge to expose only a specific subset of my devices is a bit cumbersome and doesn't work at all for some of them, so native HomeKit support in the ISY would be a welcome addition. Rob

I'm a bit confused, too. I think it's accurate to say that the schedule condition will evaluate to TRUE for the entire duration, but it will only trigger the program to run at the beginning or the end. If you manually or programmatically execute the IF clause of the program, or if there are other conditions in the IF statement (like your geofence variable), they may also cause the IF clause to be evaluated. At that point, the schedule condition will evaluate to TRUE or FALSE depending on whether you're within the time range or not.

Fair enough and I'm sure that it'll get old after a while. My impression overall is that Google Home allows for much more complex queries and responses, and it can be helpful for it to tell you what it's planning to do, especially if it's the wrong thing. I often find myself going to the Alexa app to see what the heck it thought I said, and then getting annoyed with the result. One thing that I notice with Alexa is that too often it listens to the echo off the wall behind the device and not the source of the sound. I think that's a key reason why my Echos/Dots misunderstand me unless I'm speaking directly at them. I know that some have had success with baffles to block the rear microphones and I think I'll try that. I think that the Home is better at filtering out echoes, but I haven't run any formal experiments.

"Alexa, turn on night" - "Okay" (in the tone of Eeyore) "Ok Google, turn on night" - "You got it, turning on the night!" Winner: Google Home Rob

ISY integration through the portal for Home is about the same as for Alexa - it uses all of the same program/scene/variable settings. I find Home to be superficially more conversational (it's a bit quicker to respond and the responses are richer and more complex), but otherwise I don't see a difference in functionality. They're both nice units, but the much cheaper price of the Dot makes it less expensive to deploy en masse.

Any chance that the first ISY in the portal account can be made the "Preferred ISY" by default? I expect that you'll have lots of folks setting this up for the first time and this seems like an unnecessary, unexpected, and unintuitive step for what it otherwise an excellent and "it just works" experience. Rob

That icon means that you made a change to its settings directly, or changed a scene of which it was a member. Hold the "set" button down until it beeps and the green LED starts flashing, right click on that item in the tree, and select "Write changes". Battery operated devices are asleep most of the time, so you need to take additional steps to write updates to them. Edit: That particular icon is described on page 25 of the ISY manual here: http://cache-m2.smarthome.com/manuals/12242db-manual.pdf. I think the fact that it's black-and-white may be because it tried to write the changes, failed, and the changes are still pending. Rob

Plus, it actually tells you if the message got through to the ISY, and I trust my ISY's state more than what Locative thinks it is. Sometimes the geofence doesn't trip or the call fails or the app crashes and it's more helpful to know if the message got there.

You can still have it notify you locally on success/failure and whether it makes a sound. In my case, I have Locative notify me locally on failure and Pushover notifications tell me about what's happening on the ISY.

Once you have it set up, it's really easy to connect and disconnect. iOS has a "VPN" section of the settings menu that's right next to the Wifi/Bluetooth/Cellular sections, and it's as simple as going in there and hitting the "connect" slide switch. Tap the switch again to disconnect. You'd probably want to use a dynamic DNS provider (like dyn.com) to keep track of your public IP, but it probably doesn't change very often. The nice thing about OpenVPN is that it runs over a single port that can be 443. That means that I can connect to my VPN from work where they block nearly every other port. Rob

That's what I do too. OpenVPN is pretty easy to set up if your router helps (pfSense has a nice GUI), but it's not terribly difficult to get it to run on a RPi or even a Synology NAS. The real trick is getting it to automatically connect to the VPN when an app tries to access devices on your home network, and that took quite a bit more effort. It's much more convenient, so I think it was worth it in the end.

Agreed

If you start at the quick reply box at the bottom of the thread, hit 'more reply options'. From there, there's an option to attach files, and then an 'add to post' link after the pic is uploaded.

There's a thread about this here. I expect that Locative will keep working for the foreseeable future. Rob

While it's unfortunate that Marcus has decided not to continue supporting this, the app should continue to work. The cloud backup functionality will stop working, but you don't need that for the app to work. I plan to keep using it for as long as I can. An alternative is IFTTT, but I found their geofence support to be unreliable and it's mostly opaque if anything goes wrong.

I just got geofence support up and running and it looks good! At first, I decided to screw around without reading the directions and I think I found an issue in the portal UI: I initially created a geofence and location together as "foo" and "bar" (shown as "bar" and "bar/foo"), and then I deleted the geofence node ("foo") because I didn't fully understand what it represented. In an attempt to completely start over, I tried to delete the location ("bar") by hitting the "x" next to it, but it wouldn't let me do it because it thought that it still had children. Here's an image of what happens when I hit the "x" next to "bar".

I accidentally turned that on at some point and forgot to turn it off, and then I wondered for at least a week why websites were behaving differently. The only visual difference is a change in the background, and I wish it said "private" or had an icon somewhere so that it's more obvious.