Thinking about moving from Indigo to Vera plus or Smart Things, thoughts?

[noel-pilot]

Hi all,
So whilst I love indigo I can't make it fully stable and reliable, not through indigos fault but due to the load I put on my aging Mac mini and its use as a variety of other purposes including plex server etc.

I want my HA to just work so my thoughts are an appliance like smart things or Vera plus may be the way forwards.

Primarily I'm using approx ten zwave devices, some logic like if garage door open for more than X minutes, send an email (to push notification service) and some triggers for music using both sonos and AirPlay.

I've not found much yet in terms of the actual interface for Vera and smart things so more googling needed

Just wondered on the thoughts of the group here? One key benefit of moving to Vera is the vastly better device support meaning I could progress with locks and other items within the home.

Cheers all
Noel

[chris_j_hunter]

wireless reliability & battery costs would be two concerns, but no experience of the systems mentioned, so would have to research what people had found ...

also, is the focus automation and/or remote control - automation can sound simple but is complex, meaning early enthusiasm for a particular approach can wane ... so, again, what were people's expectations, and what have people found, in reality, down the line ...

[toscal]

My vote would be for Loxone.
I know this can control Sonos. Can't remember about Zwave though, but do do an RS232 extension module.
Customer service is also excellent.

[neilk]

Having made the reverse journey from Vera to Indigo I would say invest in a dedicated newer Mini from eBay and stick with Indigo. The difference in reliability is just night and day in Indigo's favour and with Vera when things go wrong logging and trouble shooting is a nightmare, and when the box runs out of resources it does not fail gracefully (I did not have a Plus however). Run this on a dedicated Mini and it is rock solid. With Vera you will need arcane tools like Pleg (and no offence to the effort of the Author to plug the gaps but it didn't work for my mindset) to make thinks that are simple in Indigo work, and the transition from UI5 to UI7 was terrible, removing functionality and poor regression testing between frequent releases. My view is Vera is lost between trying to make this a mass market consumer product with a style over substance UI, and a hobbyists platform with deep community support. They alienated a number of the long term contributors to the community (and the authors of some of the more compelling plugins) through this transition. Indigo and Vera both do have excellent community support however that turns them both from good to great in terms of breadth of capability.

I think the device support issue is a little overstated (locks I accept) and the Indigo guys communication strategy of "it may be in the next version, company policy is not to disclose when or what is in that version". The reality is they are far more responsive and open to issues and transparent and participate with the community and I don't think locks aside the reality of device support was better in Vera. The Z Wave network reliability has been far better with Indigo, again this may be down to the earlier Vera 3 that I had rather than the plus.

Any way my view....

[davidj]

For what its worth... By way of background i'm a hobbyist with varying amounts of time on my hands ranging from a free day every so often to being totally stacked for months, I definitely dont have an hour a day messing with HA.
I used Homeseer some years ago with some success it was mainly in the days of X10 which was inherently unreliable. I retested again early part of this year, It is still very good and VERY expensive to do properly, though not very user friendly, definitely a perfect enthusiast (with spare hobby cash). I then moved to Smartthings 2 which ticked all my boxes, lots of integration, fairly straightforward front end, large incoherent and unhelpful (for beginners) community.... But totally unreliable. I then a couple of weeks ago moved to the new Vera Edge, happy days....NO! I'm still working with it but experiences some of the similar problems I experienced with Smartthings. I will keep trying.