Other Home Automation Websites/Blogs/Forums/Resources?

[Jingoro]

While this forum has been an awesome place to research and feed my Home Automation hobby, does anyone else have resources they use to come up with new ideas or do research?

** Note to mods : These links are to blogs/forums that don't seem to directly compete with Homeseer's products (per the forum rules). I hope I'm not breaking anything by posting this. **

Here are some of the sites I find useful for fueling my creativity or finding out the latest developments in the HA space.

http://cocoontech.com/ (decent source of industry news)
http://www.gordonmeyer.com/ (author who wrote an old o'reilly book about HA)
http://www.domoticaworld.com/ (great companion with homeseer)
http://homeawesomation.wordpress.com/ (for diy arduino)


Anybody have more site/resources to add?

[rmasonjr]

http://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation
http://www.z-wavealliance.org/
www.zwaveworld.com

[Pete]

Personally here I got into some of the xAP stuff going on a while back.

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/

Yup and a new one with a little automation included:

http://forum.securifi.com/

and another one I am looking at in the last few weeks...relating to automation mostly.....

http://linuxmce.org/

A DIY automation smaller site:

http://www.doghouselabs.com/system/i...i?cat=hardware

[Rutger]

http://www.domoticaforum.eu/

Some parts are in Dutch language.

[Pete]

Very nice stuff there. On other forum a user wrote a section called "Domotics for dummies". He wrote a touchscreen interface in Linux connecting with a:

1 - Rasberry PI
2 - RFXtrx433

Here is the links to his stuff. He is using the O2 Joggler with its base flash OS to manage his automation.

http://www.lucabert.de/myProgram/vie...n&idProgram=25

Another forum relating to "playing" with the AlertMe devices.

http://forum.alertme.org.uk/

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/alerty/id657769085?mt=8

[ScottRennie]

An old thread, but anyone got any updates to add that are useful to us all?

[simplextech]

The mods can delete if they want to rjh, Rupp, macromark but I don't consider these as "competition". These systems are in a different category than HomeSeer however I also find good info on what people are looking for, what they are trying to do and I get ideas from them.

https://community.home-assistant.io/
https://forum.universal-devices.com/
https://community.hubitat.com/
https://community.smartthings.com/
https://community.getvera.com/

You may notice that there are plugins to integrate a few of those with HomeSeer for added device capabilities

[macromark]

The mods can delete if they want to rjh, Rupp, macromark but I don't consider these as "competition".

Really? What systems do you think we're competing against?

[simplextech]

Really? What systems do you think we're competing against?

Well if you want to consider yourself a entry level consumer system...

Maybe some competition with Home Assistant because of the flexibility and with ISY for the power capabilities. However HASS is still a hobby project and ISY is primary Insteon and does not (yet) have the "plugins" nor interfaces/capability for interface of media options like HS. So it's of a different use case and category.

I would think HS primary competition would be around other "Controllers of Controllers" such as Allonis MyServer and Charmed Quark .... thoughts?

[macromark]

I would think HS primary competition would be around other "Controllers of Controllers" .... thoughts?

John - Do a web search on "home automation software" or "home controller" or "smart home hub" or "z-wave dimmer". That's who our real competition is.. and yes, that includes some of the companies you've linked to above.

[simplextech]

John - Do a web search on "home automation software" or "home controller" or "smart home hub" or "z-wave dimmer". That's who our real competition is.. and yes, that includes some of the companies you've linked to above.

Those others may be in the headlines and news (HST needs to market more Mark) but in line of features/functions are you saying that a $100 "hub" is competition to HS where the limited Pi version is in the price range but full versions are 3X ++ the cost of the competitions "hub"? Generally I would view "competition" to be in the same price range and market category.

[Fellhahn]

macromark Sorry if I'm breaking etiquette here but, does HST see HASS/OpenHAB as competition?

On the one hand, their existence obviously shrinks the market for people buying controller software.

But on the other, it gets more people using Z-Wave who might have never been willing to pay for the base platform. And more people using Z-Wave means more opportunity for HST hardware sales.

Do these two things cancel out? Is one a stronger factor that the other?


Back on the original topic, thanks for posting this thread Jingoro , I was thinking of asking the exact same question as I'm also increasingly hungry for HA content and news.

I check reddit.com/r/homeautomation occasionally but the community there seems to be largely full of utterly clueless individuals re-posting the same questions over and over, incapable of using the search function. A shame as Reddit is usually a beacon of enlightenment on many topics.

I found this guy's youtube channel (Dr Zzs) to be a useful compass when I was first starting. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7G...t6A9e3hJ-HO8ng

[Fellhahn]

(HST needs to market more Mark)

Agree marketing might be lacking or at least not having the desired effect. The questions I see over and over on Reddit are:



How can I do home automation without using the cloud?

How to automate my ceiling fan?

What is a good smart switch?



IMO the HS-FC200/WD200 are the only correct answers to those last two but they aren't often the first reply.

[kriz83]

I do think Hass is a competitor for HomeSeer. I think Hass deserves more than to be labeled as a .hobby project. They have far more integrations than HS. Maybe not all are working as well as they are supposed to be, but that can also be said about some of the plugins that are marketed for HS. Benefit of Hass is that it is opensource. If I find an issue that really bugs me, I'll fix it myself.

The things that fascinate me about Hass (being a 6 year HS user):

• really nice and configurable web interface, IMHO much better than HS mobile.
• high number of component integrations
• very well Node-Red support
• configuration in text format -> version control !!!!
• Very frequent updates
• Much chearper than HS (I've spent 1000$+ on HS + plugins)

Drawbacks:

• Requires a restart when adding devices
• Still in dev, so sometimes breaking changes are done.
• Support (though I haven't needed HS support)

[simplextech]

kriz83 I like HASS and have been using it for different things for the last couple years. With that said it's not a competitor for a stable/reliable central control system. Although HASS has a 1000+ components most of them are cloud based which makes lots of people happy. I find it amusing how the premise of HASS is to be a local, private/secure system yet most of what it provides is cloud dependent. The local pieces of z-wave/zigbee are still not ready for prime time.

What I will say is that as it's not a stable project yet I don't view it as a competitor.... now... the day it goes stable and they stop pushing breaking changes every other update... then I will agree it's a competitor that HST should watch closely.