My first experience with Almond+- good and bad

[macmaniac]

Hi everybody!
First let me say I'm no network expert at all, I used an Airport Extreme from Apple not needing me to configure anything.

When Almond+ Arrived it was on Software <R65, so my setup experience was based on this software version, I believe R64. Linking and connecting A+ was a breeze. However there were some hickups on the WiFi Setup.
I had chosen a very long SSID. A+ did let me set this up but this long SSID was not reconized by any device in our household. Another problem was that several channels even with shorter SSID didn't show up either.

Eventually I managed to set both 2,4GHz and 5GHz WiFi Networks up correctly so this now works fine.

Also I found it for me quite hard to cope with the IP range the almond uses (10.10.10.xxx). I know there must be a setting somewhere but as I'm not very familiar with all this network stuff I didn't find it. I used DHCP with fixed IPs before but I just changed this back to normal DHCP so for the moment this is fixed.

Portforwarding was another issue that had to be set up. This actually worked fine through the WebUI. However I found the WebUI to be hard to be found in the first place (as I was used to have the Apple Airport Utility before ;-)). For some reason I thought that under connect.securifi.com I could also set up and manage my Almond+ (yeah, I know ;-)) but didn't check on the WebUI of Almond+. However also this is resolved for me and I'm happy with the UI.
Maybe it'd be good to ship some more clearly visible manuals, even short ones, for initial setup.

What's missing right now for me personally is the ability for push-notifications in the apps as well as scripts in a way of IFTTT. I'd really love to be able to have certain actions run if a certain trigger occurs. REally hope this will follow sooner than later.

all in all I consider all of this rather minor hicups and I hope you guys from Securifi are able to resolve all issues and also to bring new features to Almond+.

[LGNilsson]

We do actually have a fair few guides on our Wiki and this was mentioned in several Kickstarter updates - http://wiki.securifi.com/index.php?title=Category:Almond%2B_2014

Have you updated to R066? We'll have the firmware updates working via the LCD UI after the next firmware release as far as I've been told.

Rather than using static IP addresses, you should consider using static IP leases which you can set up in the local router UI, but this might be a bit tricky for some, but you can find a guide here - http://wiki.securifi.com/index.php?title=Static_IP_address_lease_-_Almond%2B_2014 it needs to be updated, but it works as is.

It's not easy to stay on top of everything when the firmware updates bring with them big changes.

As for notifications, we're hoping to have that in place in a week or two, the server side part has taken a bit longer than we expected. Automation is coming as well, but we're behind schedule on this, but it'll be something similar to IFTTT, just not IFTTT for now.