A Good overall App for iPad or Android

[Chrislef]

Hi.

I'd like to know what a good overall app for the iPad or an Android tablet or phone would be - and ideally, one that:

-Will allow control of all defined X10 and Z-Wave devices, as well as WiFi switches and Bulbs

-Allow direct programming which would be saved to the ISY994...  Such as creating a new daily on and off for a device

Aside from convenient and frequent usage from a wall mounted tablet, I  want to be able to quickly add events such as on at dusk and off at 11pm, to a device Without having to go into ISY Launcher in windows, and create a new program.

-CL

 

[smacbride]

You can check out Home Assistant, but the app requires that you have a hub running their software somewhere in your house.  I've been doing it for about 6 months so far and I'm very happy with the results.

[Geddy]

@Chrislef There's no such app for the ISY that would allow you to create programs "on the fly". That's the purpose of the admin console.  As far as I know it's not expected to be a part of the UD Mobile to be able to generate programs like you would with Admin Console.

I do not use Home Assistant, but as @smacbride suggests, I'm sure others that have significant skills in HA app could help suggest how it might fit your desires. It just requires additional hardware to run HA and then integrate the ISY with the HA method of automating the process.

Good luck!

Oh, and you should try out the UD Mobile app for best all around ISY app for iOS or Android. They're still developing that so it continues to get better with every release.

 

[asbril]

I use both Home Assistant and UD Mobile. The latter is constantly adding options and it is very user friendly and my guess is that it will eventually replace the Administrative Console  (*)and be available in one's browser.

Home Assistant is also very nice but, as mentioned, you need to install on a RPi (as I did) or elsewhere. Furthermore, to access Home Assistant outside of your own network, you will need to get a $5/mo subscription.

(*)  It may eventually replace the Administrative Console or the Administrative Console will have the same structure as UD Mobile. This is just my guess, but it seems logical.

[Chrislef]

Great Advice on both the UD Mobile and Home Assistant fronts!!!  Thanks!

I will certainly try UD Mobile.

For home Assistant - the point of having it As Well as the ISY994 is to allow user friendly interactions and integrate to the ISY???  I want to understand why you'd have Home Assistant if you have an ISY994?

[Javi]

22 minutes ago, Geddy said:

There's no such app for the ISY that would allow you to create programs "on the fly". That's the purpose of the admin console.  As far as I know it's not expected to be a part of the UD Mobile to be able to generate programs like you would with Admin Console.

This is on our list for UD Mobile, but after items of higher priority.  Android is further along than iOS. Most programs conditions and executions can be viewed in app, no edits at this time.  The Favorites Command Type option is similar program execution setup and Individual Status Mappings is similar Program Conditions. This was done to help us work out any bugs before moving code to Program edits.

[Mustang65]

50 minutes ago, asbril said:

 

@asbrilHome Assistant is also very nice but, as mentioned, you need to install on a RPi (as I did) or elsewhere. Furthermore, to access Home Assistant outside of your own network, you will need to get a $5/mo subscription.

 

Add a VPN connection to your home network, a lot safer anyway.

Edited November 22, 2021 by Mustang65

[asbril]

52 minutes ago, Chrislef said:

For home Assistant - the point of having it As Well as the ISY994 is to allow user friendly interactions and integrate to the ISY???  I want to understand why you'd have Home Assistant if you have an ISY994?

Excellent question...... (1)  I installed HA before UD Mobile existed (2) I make extensive use of HA in my browser, which is my prefered method to control my ISY setup. HA is powerful and allows to make minimal use of the Administrative Console, which gives the occasional headache, not loading or stop working.

Nowadays I make less use of HA on my Iphone and mostly use UD Mobile. My expectation is that eventually UD Mobile will work in my browser and will become pretty similar to HA, and then I may drop HA.

[MrBill]

1 hour ago, asbril said:

Furthermore, to access Home Assistant outside of your own network, you will need to get a $5/mo subscription.

There are free methods for those that want to explore installing and using them.  $5/month is the easy way and also opens the door for Alexa and GH, but there are also alternate methods for that too. 

 

1 hour ago, Chrislef said:

For home Assistant - the point of having it As Well as the ISY994 is to allow user friendly interactions and integrate to the ISY???  I want to understand why you'd have Home Assistant if you have an ISY994?

When I started with Home Assistant I was using it strictly as a custom front end to the ISY, basically customized mobile pages (replacing mobilinc, eKeypad, Agave, etc)... to the day it's the only mobile remote control option that's been Wife Approved.... and I tried alot of things to make using her phone easy for her.

Since the beginning tho, there are frankly a lot more integrations for HA than there are nodeservers for the ISY.  (1,858 built in core integrations and countless more available via the Home Assistant Community Store (all free).  There's even one case where I stopped using the nodeserver for the ISY and started using HA integration instead because the HA integration is less finicky.   I've also branched out and things the ISY doesn't support at all like Zigbee shades.

If you have Insteon there's definitely a use case for both.  The Universal-devices integration at Home Assistant provides better Insteon control than the direct Insteon integration...  But I also may have been biased and not given the Insteon direct integration a very complete chance. 

Home Assistant also has a bunch of "Add-ons" that I keep discovering more that I need.   Adguard Home is one, that I use and it just works. 

 

[Chrislef]

Great info.  Sounds like Home assistant is worth a try, But I'll need another hardware interface, and it will speak nicely with ISY from what I understand...  As I have X10, Insteon and Z Wave, this might be a good and friendly addition.

 

I want something that, on a Wall Mounted iPad, Looks Pretty, and is Easy and intuitive to use...

 

[larryllix]

1 hour ago, Chrislef said:

Great info.  Sounds like Home assistant is worth a try, But I'll need another hardware interface, and it will speak nicely with ISY from what I understand...  As I have X10, Insteon and Z Wave, this might be a good and friendly addition.

 

I want something that, on a Wall Mounted iPad, Looks Pretty, and is Easy and intuitive to use...

 

Many of us wanted the same thing but once smart voice boxes, like Echo and Google Home come out they feel obsolete now. The combinations of what they can respond to is almost unlimited and much easier that getting and walking to a control panel that is beside you real wall switches.

[asbril]

16 minutes ago, larryllix said:

Many of us wanted the same thing but once smart voice boxes, like Echo and Google Home come out they feel obsolete now. The combinations of what they can respond to is almost unlimited and much easier that getting and walking to a control panel that is beside you real wall switches.

That is a matter of taste.... I have both Alexa and Google Home, with both connected to my ISY devices. Personally, to control my devices, I probably use Alexa / GH 10 % of the time, and 90% HA in my browser as well as HA & UD Mobile on my phone.

[larryllix]

2 minutes ago, asbril said:

That is a matter of taste.... I have both Alexa and Google Home, with both connected to my ISY devices. Personally, to control my devices, I probably use Alexa / GH 10 % of the time, and 90% HA in my browser as well as HA & UD Mobile on my phone.

Yes, definitely depends on your culture (previous experience) and tastes. With about 160 Alexa commands I cannot imagine even starting to use a control panel. Using a mobile app, it takes mt 2-3 minutes to get through 8 levels of menus to even find a device.

How does a control panel cover 15 different colours in three rooms? It just sounds like a lot of overcomplicated clutter on any screen less that 80" diagonal  to me.

[asbril]

4 minutes ago, larryllix said:

Yes, definitely depends on your culture (previous experience) and tastes. With about 160 Alexa commands I cannot imagine even starting to use a control panel. Using a mobile app, it takes mt 2-3 minutes to get through 8 levels of menus to even find a device.

How does a control panel cover 15 different colours in three rooms? It just sounds like a lot of overcomplicated clutter on any screen less that 80" diagonal  to me.

I guess that I am a computer freak.  I have 3 computers  in 3 different rooms, 2 Ipads, 1 Kindle Fire tablet and an Iphone.  It may be my European accent, but Alexa/GH responses are far from perfect for me.

[larryllix]

2 minutes ago, asbril said:

I guess that I am a computer freak.  I have 3 computers  in 3 different rooms, 2 Ipads, 1 Kindle Fire tablet and an Iphone.  It may be my European accent, but Alexa/GH responses are far from perfect for me.

LOL! Well, there is that too.

Doesn't the voice training of Alexa help that aspect any? I have refused to do it but it has figured out which of the three of us are talking now and addresses us by name, many times. (despite never setting this up. They are getting worse than google for second guessing everything with their artificial guessing)

Now I know where all the money goes though.

 

Edited November 22, 2021 by larryllix

[Javi]

I'll preface this with acknowledgement that I may be biased ?  .

I prefer using home automation controls on my phone, both voice recognition and from App.  Our wall mounted tablet works great for showing Google photos and thing that neighbors/friends need access to when we are gone. Young children are too loud when they are awake and I prefer not to speak at a Smart Speaker or have a Smart Speaker respond (usually in the wrong room) when they are asleep, not to mention letting a toddler have control of the house (Google's babble translating is amazing).  We have GH in every room and its mostly used for timers, podcasts, and music (did I mention children are loud). I can use voice commands on a phone with 99% accuracy event when music/movie is playing which is not even close to Smart Speaker accuracy in a noisy environment.  Although most of the time I just use the app for things in the house that are not in line of sight so I can be sure the change was made (i.e. locking the door). Also keeping ISY subscription alive until killed by the system makes the things I use most even faster than voice commands in most cases.

[Chrislef]

I guess my ideal display on the wall mounted iPad would be, and this is semi close to being so with the Google Home app:

A main screen that shows each room as a square with its name, as well as time and weather forecast...

You tap on one of the rooms, screen changes to that room and you quickly and clearly see each device in that room and its status...  and you can quickly control it.

SAY, 3 Taps and you are where you want to be, not more...  with Google home you constantly scroll up and down, find what you want open it, then open the device.....

Question - In Home Assistant or UD Mobile, can you integrate WiFi Switches and bulbs, like they are in GH and Alexa???  That is an important one for me.

My understanding is that is Not possible directly in the UD Admin Console...

Right now I have extensive X10 and some Z-wave, controlled by ISY and programs in the Admin console... I also have several WiFi devices, which are easily controlled in Google Home along with the X10 and Z-Wave...  But I'd like that above mentioned 'clean and quick to use', tablet display.

If the way to do it is with Home Assistant and a Rapsberri PI, I will do it! (must easily get along with ISY!)

 

 

[lilyoyo1]

16 hours ago, larryllix said:

Yes, definitely depends on your culture (previous experience) and tastes. With about 160 Alexa commands I cannot imagine even starting to use a control panel. Using a mobile app, it takes mt 2-3 minutes to get through 8 levels of menus to even find a device.

How does a control panel cover 15 different colours in three rooms? It just sounds like a lot of overcomplicated clutter on any screen less that 80" diagonal  to me.

160commands. I'd have a headache trying to remember all of them. ?

[Javi]

1 hour ago, Chrislef said:

A main screen that shows each room as a square with its name, as well as time and weather forecast...

You tap on one of the rooms, screen changes to that room and you quickly and clearly see each device in that room and its status...  and you can quickly control it.

Our UD Mobile App has folders (Rooms) which can show a display node (such as a scene containing all lights).  A folder (Room) can have 2 click options(top/bottom) if there is a display node. Clicking the top you can toggle a device/scene clicking the bottom opens the (Room) folder.  Weather can be added from a node server and will display in the same way. See screenshot below where all rooms are folders and show the status of lights/weather in that area/room

 

1 hour ago, Chrislef said:

Question - In Home Assistant or UD Mobile, can you integrate WiFi Switches and bulbs, like they are in GH and Alexa???  That is an important one for me.

My understanding is that is Not possible directly in the UD Admin Console...

Depends on if your devices are supported by Node Servers.  

 

[MrBill]

1 hour ago, Chrislef said:

In Home Assistant

Home Assistant has a brief learning curve of learning how to design a dashboard.  It's far easier to do today tho than it was in earlier versions and there are many tutorials on youtube.  In fact I'd say that one problems with youtube is finding current videos that teach dashboard creation through the UI rather than than straight YAML code.

However... once you learn how to make dashboards, you can make it look however you want it.  You can have a "main menu" as you've described or just swipe left and right to different sub dashboards.. or both.  You can have it your way... regardless of what your way is.  Theme's too... there are many that others have done, that are downloadable, or you can design your own... or like I did customize a downloaded theme to my liking. 

Speaking of "earlier versions",. Home Assistant is open source and has a major release on the first Wednesday of every month.  It's one of the largest and most active projects on github.  Here's a link to the current months release announcement so so you can get an idea of how much happens every month.  (beginning late 2020 the version number system changed to year.month.minor so currently we are on 2021.11 as the major release and I think they are up to about .5 with the bug fixes, or 2021.11.5.  I used to load every release, major or minor, but I've gotten to the point that I wait until towards the end of the month and load the last or near last release of the month.

An Example from my house is above, I chose this screen because it's all ISY stuff and a little bit of everything.

The downstairs temp in the upper left, comes from a wireless tag via the ISY and the wireless tag nodeserver.

The outdoor temp underneath comes from my outdoor weather station and a different nodeserver. 

The larger center fireplace button controls an Insteon/ISY Scene that actually determines if the fireplace can cycle.

Setpoint in the upper right... is the display of a state variable.  The chevrons below that temp Run Then or Run Else (one each) of an ISY program that increases or decreases the state variable by one degree.

The rest of the buttons on the screen are either Insteon devices or scenes from the ISY, except the All off button, that actually runs a helper program that sends an Off to the All Off scene and also does one other thing.

My dashboard is simple as far as dashboards.... go google "Home Assistant Dashboard Examples" and go down the rabbit hole for a nice long tour of what others have done.

 

[Chrislef]

Fantastic info everyone, Really!!!  Thanks for sharing.

Now I have to learn what 'Node Servers' are!  As well as 'wireless tags', as I like the temperature display readings idea...

[asbril]

4 hours ago, Chrislef said:

Question - In Home Assistant or UD Mobile, can you integrate WiFi Switches and bulbs, like they are in GH and Alexa???  That is an important one for me.

HA has many integrations, though I only use very few. However I have Wifi devices that I use with Nodeservers (Kasa, Lifx). These work perfectly with ISY and then show up in HA through the ISY/HA  Integration.

 

[asbril]

4 hours ago, Chrislef said:

If the way to do it is with Home Assistant and a Rapsberri PI, I will do it! (must easily get along with ISY!)

Yes my HA is on a RPi and it works perfectly.

[asbril]

55 minutes ago, Chrislef said:

Now I have to learn what 'Node Servers' are!

The Nodeservers are a game changer.  They allow you to interface with other systems (Tesla, Kasa, Lifx and many more). Personally, I make extensive use of Holidays Google which allows me to enter events in my Google Calendar which will then trigger Programs in ISY. I als use AVRemote which allows me to control my Google Chromecast and Google Home devices ( I cast different radio stations ate set times throughout my home).

There is a lot you can do with Nodeservers and these can be found in the Nodeserver Store on the Polisy. It takes a bit of time to make these work, but if I can do it, then anyone can do it.

[MrBill]

4 hours ago, Chrislef said:

Home Assistant and a Rapsberri PI, I will do it! (must easily get along with ISY!)

You can start with a 3 of you happen to have one laying around, but if you;re buying one I'd recommend a Pi 4 with 4gb.  

Also you want to use the Image that includes the Home Assistant OS and supervisor.  You can do it many other ways and even run under different OS's etc, but doing it with the HA OS and Supervisor will cut many many hours off of keeping things up to date, because in the configuration I'm recommending updates are literally push button simple.

.