Seeking advise / benefit of experience

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  • theendisnye
    Automated Home Jr Member
    • Mar 2004
    • 14

    Seeking advise / benefit of experience

    I am currently running a homeeasy based system, with an OWL power monitor, oregeon scientific weather station and a couple of x10 door and motion sensors linked via an rfxLAN running xpl. I use blueIris running on a dedicated PC to generate xpl messages when cameras are activated. I then have a dedicated PC running eventghost and DHS to do events etc using prowl to send alerts to my mobille I also have a Sonos system which is standalone and not integrated as well as Xbmc on a raspberry also standalone.

    I am finding that the homeeasy system is reaching its limitations particularly as they don't offer an easy solution for LED lights so I have started to look at alternatives as well as to try to set a general future direction of travel and investment with a view on the next house and building up some learnings.

    I don't want to undertake a major rework / re wire so I am looking for retrofit options. From the research done to date z-wave or lightwaveRf seem to be viable alternatives I just have an issue with the size of the rear boxes required for dimmers. So my current thinking is a-wave and to use fibaro Micro modules wired into ceiling roses for upstairs locations and retain the homeeasy switches for downstairs. Over time I can add more z-wave sensors power switches etc as needs arise. Does anyone have an experience of this and will it work?

    That means I need to change my automation engine. So my current considerations are;
    1. homeseer with a z-wave dongle and RFXtrx433e and control everything through homeseer, that will then hopefully give me voice control and mobile apps as well. Not sure if I will do the software or one of the dedicated controllers yet.
    2. the Vera controller with a RFXtrx433e however that seems to use their servers and the forums suggest it lacks memory.
    3. to supplement my existing system with a z-wave dongle and a seperate z-wave engine and see if I can integrate the two.

    I want something that is easy to set-up and manage the basics initially, but something I can develop over time if required it will need to do Z-wave and the 433 devices as near as possible out of the box. Any thoughts or inputs?
  • kaivalagi
    Automated Home Jr Member
    • Nov 2014
    • 16

    #2
    If you have a dedicated PC that can manage things 24/7 or are up for running a dedicated Raspberry PI it might be worth taking a look at Domoticz, it's a HA system with a feature rich web frontend. It'll do everything I think you need and allow you to bolt on whatever you want via scripts too, it's very flexible and the UI ain't bad either. There's also a few Android remote control apps that work well with it too, Domotica for example, or you can use the web interface which does a good job of rendering for mobiles too. It may be worth having a good rummage around on the Domoticz forum to see what others have done with it, if nothing else it may give you some ideas.
    Last edited by kaivalagi; 3 December 2014, 01:36 PM.

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