moving from a public post to roadmap.

it would be great to be able to eventually create variable widgets on the nodes pages like I can with UD Mobile. I don't use the eISY UI at all to interact with my systems because I don't generally directly manipulate nodes - I use state variables for many things to track button presses around the house or desired settings. Example- I don't ever touch a thermostat- each room in the house has a desired state for mode and temperature that is determined by many variables, such as occupancy, home occupancy, window and door status, outside temperature, season, forecast, etc. If I directly change a thermostat on one of these interfaces without first setting an override variable/flag, eISY with just put it back.

I do this type of setup for most every subsystem. For lighting, eISY tracks room occupancy based upon motion or manual button presses and runs timers. If I want to turn off all the lights in a room, I'm not turning off each node- instead I've used a UDM variable button action that just sets the occupancy to zero for that room when pressed. And another timer kicks off for HVAC setback in that zone as well.

On mobile I can include these state variables and desired settings right along the thermostat display widgets on the favorites section, for example. Then every control surface could just show the nodes page rather than having to update my iPhone UDM build, then export/update to my spouse's phone and kitchen iPad and also track any changes in parallel with eISY UI too.

additional thoughts since original post:

It seems there is a lot of interest in AI to control your home. I’m not a big proponent of that personally. I much prefer what I’ve done above search that the logic is deterministic. It might be helpful to analyze logs and look for patterns to help you make a decision as to the optimal value of a variable for a cutoff or trigger, or perhaps even to determine optimal variables to include. However, I want predictable outputs at my home. It does require making fairly complex systems built up out of multiple simple programs were no single program is determining the specific and state. That does make it somewhat hard in the current interface to figure out what the end state will be as you have to look across multiple related programs, and I can only put each program in a single folder.

That makes me think another simple UI improvement would be folders for variables. Currently, I’m using a naming convention to keep track of them all but being able to organize related concepts would be a helpful as well.

Speaking of variables and programming, it would be a convenient feature if we could create new variables while editing a program. When the variable list comes up in any instruction involving variables, a button to create a new one right then and there would help avoid the back and forth between program editing and variables.

18 hours ago, SJK said:

It seems there is a lot of interest in AI to control your home. I’m not a big proponent of that personally.

O lord! Where did you get that from? eisy-ai is anything BUT what you are suggesting. It's just another interface (like the UI) but it has the capability of helping others (not you) with designing complex programs (the same exact thing you do with point and click). AI does NOT run anything.

With kind regards,
Michel