Petera, that HomeGenie looks interesting, especially with that dashboard presentation. I'll be reading up on it for sure. If I understood your statement correctly when you referred to the HA bridge being used "in conjunction" with it, you mean that HomeGenie by itself doesn't support Alexa, so HA bridge is still needed for that. I did read up on HA bridge and it appears that in the past, compatibility issues did creep up with some changes that Philips made, esp with device id's now having 9 octets. The latest version of the bridge (5.4.1) is from January this year and the previous release was 2 years ago, so things seem to be quite stable.
HomeGenie seems to support conditional scripting, which is something I'll probably leave in the Ocelot. Ask Jeff, once you've known the reliability of the Ocelot, it's not tempting to go to something else. It's ladder logic programming model is what drew me to it (and tripped up most other users!). They kept me busy on the appdig forum! You can do very complex, nested logic with the Ocelot, and the expansion hardware module (inputs, outputs, IR commands) provide that functionality that's rarely available with other home automation platforms. Those that do are things like the ELK M1 and the JDS Time Commander and Stargate. The Ocelot rates close to zero in sexiness, and isn't trying to be. It's more of a critical internal organ like the heart that just need to keep beating to keep everything else going.
The one thing that would draw me to using the HomeGenie as a front end is what seems like an Android app. That just might be the missing piece in my otherwise complete puzzle, and might save me learning programming (I'm 63 and the desire to learn new stuff isn't as strong). I'll certainly check it out. Thanks for the suggestion.
The Smartenit device Jeff is talking about seems to be more of a dedicated bridge type device, and though it supports X10, they do so through what used to be no longer available Smarthome interfaces, instead of the much more easily available X10 ones like the CM11A or CM15A. Is Smartenit an offshoot of what was Smarthome?
That's the thing with the long term viability of some products. Technology products often have a short support lifespan. When I last did this stuff as a hobby 15 years ago. New protocols were coming out like crazy. Insteon, UPB, Zwave, Zigbee etc. Then much of it shifted towards IP based, which at least made interoperability possible. Since that time, UPB is down to just one supplier (if I read that right at Cocoontech), Insteon went down with the demise of Smarthome and some kind of possible resurrection might be in the works. X10 itself made an abrupt exit and was restarted under new ownership. In several of these cases, cloud based products ceased to work overnight with no warning. You can understand why we can get gun shy of cloud based products. As I've said before, it's nice as an extra (how many times do you really need to control your lights "from anywhere in the world"?) but local control remains king in my mind. That's another plus with the HA bridge emulating a Philips Hue bridge: Alexa will keep working with it even if your internet goes down, according to some posts I've read.
Author
Topic: I'm getting back into the automation hobby (Read 2919 times)