Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Forum about Domotica Home Automation for dummies, is only for the real beginner questions.

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olof
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Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Post by olof »

Home Automation (HA) controllers: a subjective overview
Home Automation (HA) controllers: a subjective overview
HA overview Olof.jpg (85.08 KiB) Viewed 10422 times
For those of you who are just beginning to research the options on Home Automation ("HA"), in particular which controller technology to base your installation on, maybe this overview-map can help somewhat. Mind you, done by a non-technical guy who places himself on the left side of this map.

My primary observations:
There's no 'one HA controller fits all'. Your choice of HA controller depends on where you make trade-offs between 3-factors:

(1) TIME: How much time are you willing/technically able to spent on researching, setting it up, programming, tinkering and maintaining your HA controller/platform?

(2) QUALITY LEVEL OF HA ENJOYMENT BY FAMILY MEMBERS: Your ambition level of how good the HA experience should be for your family members, not you!
The spouse & kids only care that it works, that it's easy to operate, that it is idiotproof and that is very stable without any hassles for them. Don't underestimate how difficult it actually is to achieve an high quality level in this regard! To me, it's better to have a limited application (remotely switch one lamp, for example) which works perfectly, rather than an extensive installation which crashes all the time or reacts very slowly.

(3) BUDGET: Your financial budget. A large budget can significantly reduce your own time-spent & increase HA enjoyment quality, but the investment can increase rapidly if you seek professional advice and installation help!

My own profile and my choice of HA technology
- I definitely sit somewhere on the left side of the picture. I'm not a technical guy, don't want to be and I don't want to spent too much time setting all the technical HA stuff up.
- My purchase of HA technology came before I realized the 3 tradeoff factors and I based my choice only on (2) ambition/quality, and a little bit on (3) budget. I can't afford KNX, but do want to achieve a similar level of premium HA experience.
- My choice was an "Homeseer combi" with RFXCom/Visonic + z-wave devices. Still an excellent choice versus KNX, but I underestimated the @#$! time spent getting it all set-up.
- If I was to start over as a beginner, I would probably start with Vera + Z-wave devices. And in a few years if I ran into limits with the Vera, would I switch to Homeseer. Again, remember my user profile when interpreting my statements!

My take on controlling-technologies left out of this overview:
X10, A10 Xanura Marmitek: old technology, slower response to changes, subject to interference.
FS20: should be in the overview, but I don't have any experience with it and don't know where to place it. Any input appreciated and I will add it to the overview
Arduino: I see it as part of the 'open source controller's' group.
DomotiGa: open source controller software. I've lumped it together in the 'open source' group.
Zigbee: very nice technology, probably technologically better than Z-wave. Some big problems though; virtually no interoperability between products from various manufacturers, severe lack of products in Europe.
Plugwise: nice technology, only for energy management, no general-purpose HA controller.Hence not this overview

Last thoughts: the 'Domoticaforum' here
This forum is a great place for us Europeans to pick up valuable information on what is/is not possible with Home Automation. The (vast) majority of contributors I would describe as being 'Right-siders' on the map; they tend to have (extensive) technical background, are willing/able to spent lots of time on their HA systems, experimenting with it, etc..
So, to me and other 'Left-siders' it can sometimes be overwhelming and confusing. But no worries, everybody here is very nice and helpfull!! :D

Hope this overview will help you in your search. Please let me know, I'm curious to find out if this non-techie stuff is of benefit to anyone out there

Cheers,
Olof
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Re: Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Post by DJF3 »

Spot on! I really like your observations and agree with most of it.

For me the golden combination is Homeseer+RFXCOM where
- Homeseer gives you a LOT of flexibility to customize & integrate + a huge and active developer/support community
- RFXCOM lets you pick and choose the best-of-breed/best-price and easy to deploy solutions (easy because of RF).

Wired solutions are great but usually expensive, less customizable and eh.. expensive.

Quite often I am asked to setup systems for other people. I send them elsewhere because the fantastic system works great but does require a lot of technical knowledge and time to continuously maintain/operate/fine-tune.

Frequently the complex structure of my events, devices and scripts reveal bugs in situations I had never thought of (both cars gone before 10am but 1 returning just after 10am did *NOT* switch my heating back to 'normal': working in a cold house until I found out after 5 hours ;-)

(have to go now because my son is trying to 'integrate' the TV remote with sandwiches ;-)
olof
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Re: Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Post by olof »

DJF3,

Thanks for responding. Nice to see that someone appreciates it. :)

Cheers,
Olof
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Re: Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Post by Post-IT »

Nice overview. For those reading this, I can add my personal experience.

I started off with a Homeseer/Xanura/RFXCOM/Plugwise. However the bottleneck each time was the stability of Windows, mostly in combination with USB controlled HA. Also because I thought KNX was too expensive to start with.

Now I have a working KNX Powerline setup (because it was too late to put bus cable everywhere). The price I paid for this setup was not much more then my first Homeseer setup.
The setup for KNX is as much a hurdle as understanding how to manually configure an IP network. If you know how to number things and how the structure works, it is practically the same as setting up a Xanura network (or IP network). The books helped me understand this.
Now I notice I have a far more stable network (with exception from the Plugwise part), which has so many modules and options available within Europe. For example, I'm getting a new airconditioning next week, I could integrate it in Homeseer using and IRtrans and sending signals for around €150, but only 1-way communication, and in addition to that I would have to spend more money if I would like to know the temperature in the room. For the same price I now by a KNX module which allows extensive 2-way communication. I can read settings, sensors and get error responses, I can set all main settings, scenes and more.

Also a lesson I learned is about estimated lifetime for a system. A friend of mine with a KNX setup (installed almost 10years ago) wanted to control things with his iPad. Just installing a KNX IP gateway of around €100 gave him full control of his "old" system. That won't work so easy with Xanura or similar products.

If I could turn back time, I would definitively go for KNX. As price was not that much higher in the end, and the hours spent would have been far less then with Homeseer/Xanura after all.
olof
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Re: Home Automation controllers; a subjective overview

Post by olof »

Since I think beginners can use all the help when starting out, I hereby take the liberty of reposting an interesting link which showed up in a different corner on this Forum:

http://domoticavergelijken.info/

With thanks to AshaiRey!
His original posting: domoticaforum.eu/viewtopic.php?f=7& ... amp;t=9570

Cheers,
Olof
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