Securifi Community Forum
Securifi Products => Almond+ => Topic started by: medatom on November 30, 2014, 07:32:22 pm
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Any chance of integrating with wink, so that wink can be either primary or secondary? I am not sure almond plus can be ready for automation, scheduling, etc until mid 2015?
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Automation should come in early 2015, but we don't support any secondary controller stuff at the moment, but it's something we're planning on adding as well. That said, the focus for our software team right now is to get the automation done as quickly as possible.
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The reason I was asking, i heard that wink supports 433,Bluetooth as well so it will nicely complement almond plus which it lacks.
I got some Bluetooth tags and Bluetooth lamps which I want to trigger or triggered based on the scenes.
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Have you managed to connect any of these devices to the Wink hub? I can't seem to find an option for anything Bluetooth... 433 seems to be Lutron if I'm not wrong.
Considering the Almond+ and the Wink hub are quite different, it's be near enough impossible for us to control the Wink hub. What you're asking for might work for Z-Wave, but nothing else.
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any updates on this? i have a lutron light switch and the almond + does not seem to recognize it at all. i waited patiently for the almond + and assumed that it was ready for prime time. is this not the case?
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Sorry? We never said we'd support Lutron, it's a different standard. The Almond+ supports ZigBee and Z-Wave only and we've never claimed anything else.
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WOW!!!!!
As somebody that got a Wink back in July to play with while waiting for my A+, I can't believe somebody wants A+ to be more like Wink. A+ is already more reliable and stable the day it is released to the public than the Wink is after 6 months of disguised public Beta testing. Wink is more concerned about having a "pretty app" and funny commercials than they are about having a device that actually works.
I fell for it and bought the wink compatible Honeywell Thermostats ,then found out that they were not actually supported. So I just controlled them with the Honeywell app and was happy. When wink did add support for them, I suddenly found my heat being turn up or down randomly throughout the day and night. I woke up in a puddle of sweat at 3am because Wink decided it wanted the house at 80* too many times. Sitting at the desk wondering why it seems cold and find that Wink decided to turn it down to 60* ,just to see if I'd notice. I unregistered both Thermostats and have not had a singe incident of heat changing of it's own free will since.
The trigger time on my A+ has been about 0.25 sec from the time I tap the app and the light goes on/off. With the Wink, the delay is 5-10 seconds. To the point that you turn on a light wait wait wait assume the command didn't register, so tap it again. Then wait wait wait again ,the light will finally come on and then go right back off because you tapped it twice.
I won't even get started on the Wink Spotters .
Yes I am hoping that at some point the A+ app will be able to integrate with TCP hub (already does with HUE) and Honeywell , but I waited 18 months to get my A+ and I am more than happy to wait until they can get the integration right and not just push out a product that is barely Beta claiming it is a public release. A+ may not be perfect, but they openly admit that there are in Beta and to expect and report bugs.
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To me, that's the biggest appeal of the Almond+ as well. All the home automation is handled locally, with remote control available, so I'm not reliant on someone else's cloud infrastructure to do any work. (And if Securifi's cloud dies, I can just VPN in to my house and control the Almond from the Web UI.)
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Plus - some wink hardware like the light bulbs are ZigBee so they do work with the Almond+
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Plus - some wink hardware like the light bulbs are ZigBee so they do work with the Almond+
Erm, your statement is wrong. The A+ does support ZigBee as Lars stated above. Is it possible you meant to reference these TCPI "Connected" lights instead?
http://go.tcpi.com/ConnectedProducts
These do not work with the A+, as they are running on JenNet-IP (http://go.tcpi.com/Connected_Gateway_FAQ)
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Bought one to play with (it was $.99, when buying two link bulbs). Was not great, actually was pretty terrible. I spent a ton of time on support. Didn't matter. Apparently it has improved but is still very limited and really only meant to work with its selected partners. And yes some of the sensors work with the A+, which is very nice sense the sensors are pretty decent (certain ones, don't ever buy the spotter) and like the Iris stuff at Lowes it comes in a fairly good price point and is available at a physical store (some is anyways). It's too bad more of that stuff doesn't work out of the box.
Edit: @vansens that is what Nonaitall said...
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Erm, your statement is wrong. The A+ does support ZigBee as Lars stated above. Is it possible you meant to reference these TCPI "Connected" lights instead?
http://go.tcpi.com/ConnectedProducts
These do not work with the A+, as they are running on JenNet-IP (http://go.tcpi.com/Connected_Gateway_FAQ)
Ummm..... I think he said they do work with the Almond+
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Sorry, my bad. I mis-read.
<cower in shame>
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I was just making sure I wasn't going crazy :D
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No worries just wanted you to have correct info :P
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We'll try to add support for as many of their sensors/devices as we can, but there'll be things that we can't support, like the 433MHz stuff.
I have a Wink hub on my desk and yesterday I tried updating the firmware and considering I used to test hardware for a living for many years, this was easily one of the worst experiences I've ever had.
It started with a red flashing light for about 15 minutes and then another half an hour with a solid red light and nothing seemed to happen.
In the end, I chanced it and rebooted it and the app told me to update the firmware again... this time it did work though and only took about 10 minutes.
In as much as I don't want to throw stones in a glass house, as we have plenty of issues of our own, this is not something you want to go through. We've spent a lot of time and resources on making sure we will be able to avoid these kind if issues when it comes to firmware updates and it should be pretty solid by the time we release R070.
The other thing I don't understand is how the Wink guys figured it was a good idea to not have a reset button, in fact, I was told by their support team (yes, I had to contact their support in the past) that they don't need one... I have to say that the person I talked to was very nice and patient and I have no complaints about their support.
Just my two cents from a personal perspective, please note that this doesn't represent the opinion of Securifi.
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Lars I agree with your sentiments here. I think I read an article just in the last few days were the CEO or president mentioned they rushed the Wink out to get it into market knowing it wasn't ready. It was evident IMMEDIATELY when trying to use one. I think they have two advantages. One they are selling at Home Depot and two they are backed, at least partly, by GE. That provides the capital to do things like sell it for $.99 when you buy two other items and provides the feeling of security to customers that the brand / technology etc is there to last. In the end it hurts the home automation market in some ways, making it seem unreliable and possibly unrealistically cheap, and helps in others by getting people more interested in HA. Just a couple of my cents. I considered selling one of my Wink hubs to pay for some other sensors once they were no longer on sale but based on pricing I'd get like half a light switch... :P. I may keep one around so I can use it to upgrade firmware on their sensors when it is needed.
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I bought a ton of GE Link light bulbs (60) and did it when they were doing to promo for the hub, so I had 30 hubs. My plan was to sell them on ebay and recoup some of the cost of the LED bulbs. I have sold all of them except 5, and will probably be done by the end of next week.
I didn't even open any of them at first since I had the A+ to use for the automation. After selling about 15, I had two people report back that they had issues setting it up. I researched online and tried to give them some suggestions to no avail. I had them return them and thought it had to be something they were doing and began trying it myself...I couldn't get it to work (Lars, the one I had has a reset button to the left of the power cord). After being unsuccessful, I decided to open one of the new ones I had...it setup with no issues.
My guess is that they have a few duds out there and if you have any issues at all (besides making sure you're connecting to a 2.4ghz channel and using the correct security settings on the router or no security at all) then just wrap it all up and return it for another one.
I had plans on rooting one, but haven't had the time to devote to doing it. One of the guys that bought one from me did and he's pretty satisfied...doesn't require an internet connection to work.
Just thought I'd pass along my experience...
Matt
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THAT IS SOOOO MANY LIGHT BULBS, I honestly don't think I could do that many. Did you replace all your switches too or just using the app to control all of your lighting?
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Lars, the one I had has a reset button to the left of the power cord
Oh, there's a button, but all it does is power cycle the hub, it doesn't do a reset...
Did you connect all 60 bulbs to your Almond+? ;D
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Matthew ,I wish I'd gone your route and just gotten the GE bulbs. Although I have no clue where I would use 60 bulbs. I bought 2 of the Wink Spotters to get my $1 hub.
Then bought a bunch of TCP bulbs ( since they were on the same display as compatible, which of course I found out was not true. You need to have the TCP hub and Greenwave account, the Wink app just links to your TCP/Greenwave account . I have about 20 now between GE and TCP and that pretty much covers the house as far as every socket that can accept an A19 bulb. I do wish somebody would come out with a smart bulb with the smaller E12 candelabra base.
Then I bought 2 of the Honeywell "wink compatible " WiFi thermostats to once again find out that they in no way connect to the Wink. You link your Honeywell connect account in Wink App and Wink will display the current temp ( best part of this is the app shows an average of all your linked thermostats and all other temp sensors. So mine usually showed between 40* and 60* ANY ATTEMPT to change the set temp through Wink app is sent through Honeywell connect as a PERMANENT change. Wink logs also showed that Wink just loved to randomly adjust the temp ( as I mentioned in earlier post ) and yes those were sent to thermostat as a permanent change. IMPO the random temperature changes probably had to do with Wink averaging all temps, so it raised my thermostats to 80* in the attempt to make up for the outdoor temp sensors reading 20*.
Wink support was fairly good at the beginning. In September I got a notification that they were sending me one of the yet to be released (at the time) Wink Relays to Beta test for them before they were released in Nov/Dec. Then it seems in late October (about the time their "cute" robot ads started airing) they apparently made a conscious corporate decision to just bury their heads in the sand and deny any and all customer issues. By late November you saw several user forums about Wink issues suddenly disappear from the web. I never did get my Relay to play with.
I will admit that my experience with Wink gave me serious thought and doubts about investing my time and money in A+. If a company with a wallet as deep as GE and Home Depot can't make a reliable product ,what hope was there for Securifi ? I missed out on the Kickstarter, but followed along in the forum, Facebook ,and updates about all the delays in going to market.
The big factor in my decision to invest, was Securifi's consistent admission that they know there are issues and are working on them. They don't want a product that doesn't work. Something Wink stopped doing after about 3 months. The fact I had already invested thousands of dollars in supposedly Wink enabled products that I couldn't use helped too.
As long as Securifi keeps acknowledging issues and promising to be working on a solution, I will continue to support them. I have no problems Beta testing, but when a company pushes a product out knowing it is a Beta release, then stops supporting it and ignoring customer issues, then I have a problem.
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THAT IS SOOOO MANY LIGHT BULBS, I honestly don't think I could do that many. Did you replace all your switches too or just using the app to control all of your lighting?
I initially only bought 4 bulbs and got the 2 penny hubs from Amazon, I immediately posted the Hubs on ebay and sold them for $35 before even receiving them in the mail! So I got all excited and tried to find more, amazon was sold out but Home depot online had a ton...so I ran around the house counting all of our light bulbs and made a $1000 gamble!! My plan was to sell the hubs and if all i ended up with was the LED bulbs, i'd be happy....after all is said and done I think I'll have paid ~$5 per bulb! Which I thought was worth it for just an LED bulb not to mention the home automation potential.
As I got the bulbs in, I setup every single one to the A+ (took a long time!), but found that since I hadn't bought any switches all I could use was the phone app to control them...not very convenient. I removed all of the bulbs when I setup the Wink, I had a moment of silence when I did it because it had taken SO long to set them all up.
After deciding to try the Wink, I've found that it's able to setup multiple bulbs at once...much easier than the A+ setup initially (not sure if its changed since the 69cb release). I also like the ability to group bulbs with the Wink hub.
I was also able to pick up 2 "spotter" sensors at Home depot for $29/ea but haven't messed with those yet...now that I have the Wink setup I will probably set them up to try out the robots.
I'll keep messing with the Wink until the A+ automation gets better and then ultimately shift back over to the A+ since it doesn't lag like the Wink does when turning lights on/off.
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@rldreams - Doing home automation isn't as easy as it looks, even the guys that have been in this game the longest, i.e. Vera/MiOS, did some really bad mistakes when they updated their software platform and got a lot flack from their users.
We're working on the logic of how some things should work still and it can be really tricky to get that right and at the same time easy to use.
I do kind of feel for Wink at times, but if what you said is true, then that was a poor choice on their side. Hopefully they'll get that part sorted out, as they seem like an otherwise decent company.
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@matthew7899 when I initially picked up a wink hub I got two spotters, they are / were awful. Constantly misreporting, failing to report, disconnecting, reporting dead batteries. Did not work at all. Waited a bit (hoping GE bulbs would be out soon) and finally returned and picked up GE bulbs at the same time and a couple hubs. I hear they have new customizable spotters coming out that allow you to pick what sensors you want and can include a switch / button of some kind. If they work like the old ones they also wouldn't be worth it to me.
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I setup one of the spotters and completely agree with you. I was also trying to setup a robot and was wanting to use the spotter as a trigger for a light and have the light shutoff so many minutes after it sensed motion...I don't think it's possible with the current software.
@matthew7899 when I initially picked up a wink hub I got two spotters, they are / were awful. Constantly misreporting, failing to report, disconnecting, reporting dead batteries. Did not work at all. Waited a bit (hoping GE bulbs would be out soon) and finally returned and picked up GE bulbs at the same time and a couple hubs. I hear they have new customizable spotters coming out that allow you to pick what sensors you want and can include a switch / button of some kind. If they work like the old ones they also wouldn't be worth it to me.
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I don't use wink at all. I do use almond+ a lot ;D. I think I mentioned already I'm going to keep a wink hub to update firmware on my wink branded sensors when necessary.