Feature Suggestions

[ocxoman]

DEVICE DISPLAY FILTERS: How are these supposed to work?

Having no filters on FLOOR, ROOM and CATEGORY filter options selected displays all Devices that were created.
Selecting all floors in the FLOOR filter results in all devices being displayed. Likewise selecting all rooms in the ROOM filter has no effect on displayed devices. But now my display has a huge filter banner on the top which effectively did nothing to which devices are listed. Now the logic gets inverted and unchecking an floor or room removes devices in that floor or room from the display.

I do not want to display any timers or counters on the device page so logically I check all items on the FLOOR filter and then X out the Counters-Times FLOOR. I now have what I need with a HHHUUUUUGGGGEE 7 line banner on my mobile device that leaves almost no room to look at the devices. If there is also one ROOM I wish to exclude the banner takes up my whole screen and no devices can be seen. I use a tablet with the web page display, not the mobile app.

So that means items checked in the FLOOR filter includes those devices unless of course you have none checked and that also means all devices are displayed.

I can check the filters by clicking on FLOOR, ROOM or CATEGORY, so why is the big banner required showing all checked items? If there a way to remove the filter list from the display?

Also since the default display of devices is to include why don't the FLOOR and ROOM filter checked items cause those items not to be displayed if a single item is checked?

Now I think I've got this understood as all of the items in the CATEGORY drop down are still unchecked and all those category's are are being displayed. So checking all items would logically work the same way. NOT So I do not understand the logic behind these filters. In electrical engineering there are band pass and band stop or notch filters.
The FLOOR and ROOM filter act like an all pass filter with no items check or all items checked. Once all items are checked, the FILTER become a notch filter for any devices in the unchecked floor or room

Logically if all categories are selected by the filters then it becomes an all pass filter. Now I'm trying to use the CATEGORY filter on devices display page and cannot figure out the logic for this filter. So, I checked fans category, and I have no devices in the fans category and no devices were visible, I thought maybe this is the reverse logic and checking one item creates a band pass or display filter and that will only allow fans to be displayed. Not so.
So I checked all devices in categories and then uncheck fans but still have no devices.
It seems to make no difference which CATEGORY item is checked, as when any one of them is checked or all of them are checked, no devices are displayed.

How are these filters supposed to work?

I could go without understanding the logic of it, it the big banner showing filter items was removed. When adding a new device to a new ROOM or FLOOR, I just click on the category and check it. The banner adds no information because the new ROOM or FLOOR is not shown and I can find out with one click that I must do anyway to add the missing FLOOR or ROOM.

So the feature I'm looking for is a way to remove the checked filter items from the display banner at the top of the page and go back to the one line that lets me select FLOOR ROOM CATEGORY.

[langenet]

Yes, I don't much like all the filters either. In HS3 for those devices I didn't always want to see, I created a room called hidden and put the devices of concern in there. When I wanted to look at them, I would check the functional group to view them. The show all devices messed up my device list.

To the point of the Op, showing and/or rather having the ability to hide the list of filters would be a nice addition.

[davidcald]

I agree the HS4 device filtering could be made to be much more useful, especially as the number of devices, areas, rooms and categories grow. I've made full use of the area/room/category structure but find it difficult to view quickly what I need to see. Two things I like to suggest:

1. Add Boolean logic functionality to the filtering with AND, OR, NOT operators. This way I can filter very easily for instance "NOT rnbWeather" where rnbWeather is a Room. This would return all devices except where Room=rnbWeather.
2. Add ability to save filters. This would allow user to create a custom device filter logic for display, save the logic with a name, and recall that filter by name for reuse. The saved filter would be available across system restarts and new UI sessions by saving the filter logic on the server. Functions should be available to the user to manage the saved filters such as delete, rename, etc.

[RFB]

I would like to see a delay at boot time setup option for HS4, either in the O/S or in the startup.vb script prior to anything else happening. I have a rather complex local network based on a mesh router system and StarLink access to the internet. Due to the power on delays associated with these network devices, the Homeseer PI HS4 fails to boot properly upon a power failure and subsequent restoration of power restart. It fails to find the Insteon Hub (different mesh router due to location critical radio) and subsequently boots without its Insteon devices. It never makes the correct connection to the Insteon Hub. The only way it works is to manually reboot it after the entire local mesh network and StarLink modem system is up and running.

I corrected this by adding a 2-minute delay to the Debian Linux startup script. It works now, but that has made my Homeseer factory PI O/S non-standard now. A setup parameter allowing a variable boot delay would solve this restart problem for a lot of cases where mesh systems or satellite internet is involved.

[MrWassen]

I was a long time HS3 user who finally upgraded to HS4 a few months ago. I have now had a chance to "digest" the new functionality that came with the HS4 upgrade and I am generally very pleased with the changes provided. Off the top of my head I will mention UI improvements, the ability to discover events referencing devices as well as the ability to easily locate broken devices. Also, the recently added device filter is fantastic as it replaces the (in my mind) less useful search listing. Ongoing system stability is solid and the upgrade process was fairly straightforward (although not without a few minor hiccups :-)).

Here is my suggestion for an HS4 feature (apologies if this has been brought up before):

It would be great if the "architecture" built in HS4 for devices was extended to events and other things like timers, counters etc. This would include:

- normalize events, devices, counters, timers and variables using the current architecture used for devices
(i.e. grid view/list view, drilldown to a tab display where events would have a tab for the logic, another for event settings etc.
- going forward refer to all events, devices, timers, counters etc. as "Home Automation Objects"
- add the Room and Floor attributes to events and all other "HAO" types
- change the device view to be a global object view, depending on the search different object types can be listed together
- add a selection dropdown at the top of the "object" listing allowing the selection of Object Types (devices, events etc.) similar to the selections for Room and Floor in the current device view.
- following from the above, the filter functionality would apply to all "objects" = devices, events, counters, timers
- expand the referencing functionality to apply to all objects (not just events referencing a given device)
- sunset the old listing based search view.

I realize this would be a significant undertaking but I believe it would contribute greatly to the user friendliness of the product and lead to a better more intuitive "Home Automation Management" experience.

[upstatemike]

I would like to see a delay at boot time setup option for HS4, either in the O/S or in the startup.vb script prior to anything else happening. I have a rather complex local network based on a mesh router system and StarLink access to the internet. Due to the power on delays associated with these network devices, the Homeseer PI HS4 fails to boot properly upon a power failure and subsequent restoration of power restart. It fails to find the Insteon Hub (different mesh router due to location critical radio) and subsequently boots without its Insteon devices. It never makes the correct connection to the Insteon Hub. The only way it works is to manually reboot it after the entire local mesh network and StarLink modem system is up and running.

I corrected this by adding a 2-minute delay to the Debian Linux startup script. It works now, but that has made my Homeseer factory PI O/S non-standard now. A setup parameter allowing a variable boot delay would solve this restart problem for a lot of cases where mesh systems or satellite internet is involved.

Another option might be a time delay power strip such as is used in server farms and high end stereo systems to contol equipment power on sequences.