EyezOn Forum

yes that's what I am asking about.

Vera has a great community forum with many active users, and some like me lurk around here too.

Vera by MiCasaVerde (MCV) uses Z-Wave natively, but can also be augmented to talk to Insteon devices (using the plugin Altseon for the best experience).

While Vera itself is closed-source, it does allow plugins, which can be made by anyone and incorporated into the system. One such major plugin I now use is the DSC plugin. It connects to the TPI, and gets events in real time. Alarm panels have far better reliability than Z-Wave sensors (and vastly better battery life of wireless sensors). Also, Vera has complete control of the panel, and can arm/disarm at will (many only use the plugin to arm the DSC panel, so that no user codes are stored on Vera, since backups can be stored on the MCV/MiOS servers.) You can expose some (or all) of your DSC sensors to Vera. Then, an event, such as a door opening, can trigger a scene, such as turning on the lights for 2 minutes, and back off. Or if a door remains open for too long, turn off the HVAC, and turn it back on when the door is closed. There are a bunch of other plugins available...weather, audio/video control, weather, etc. You can look at plugins here.

You can communicate with Vera via a web browser and HTTP commands, either locally or remotely, through the MCV/MiOS servers.. There are a number of iPhone and Android apps to connect to it, some free, some paid. For Android, I use one called AutHomationHD (free) and for iOS I have switched to HomeWave ($3.99). The authors of both are active on the forum and very responsive.

I have been using a Vera for about a year and a half, and have had some issues. For one, my Z-Wave network of 60+ devices was too many for my Vera2, and I was running out of memory. I upgraded to a Vera3, which had 4 times the memory, and haven't run into memory issues again.

Another quirk is the closed nature of Z-Wave. It's a "standard" but what portions are implemented on a given device and how they are implemented might be different. Sometimes things will communicate directly with each other, and sometimes they won't. MCV does a decent job of support all certified devices, but there are some stragglers.

One common sentiment is the lack of documentation, or out-of-date documentation. The documentation can be found on the MCV Wiki and DocSite

Sorry for the delay... I've had Vera a couple of months now. So far... I'd highly reccomend it...with one stipulation.... While The basics (turning on /off lights etc) can be accomplished by someone non-technical, it's power is really for us geeks:)

It uses a programming script language called Luup that allows for unlimited control as
long as the device has commands to control it. If you're using DSC, you have great control and feedback using the EnvisaLink. That's really why I choose to go this route. All the motion detectors in the DSC System can be used as stimulus for triggering an action. The setup of th DSC plugin took a little playing to get everything right... but thats half the fun.

While it can control X10/Insteon, most control uses z-wave. So far really like Z-Wave. More expensive... But with the feedback and routing (extending the range by passing commands from one box to another) it is worth it to me. It supports the Foscam FI8910w IP camera of which I have two. It does not use the sound.

As far as reliability, so far the only time it's failed is when I programmed it wrong.

I have it doing the following:

- turns on/off porch lights at dusk & dawn
- turns on/off Christmas Lights
- sends a jpg via email of whoever enters anything on the DSC keypad
- enables the motion detection on my Foscam camera whenever the DSC is armed.
- if theres an alarm on my DSC, the camera uses the motion detection of the DSC to turn the camera towards that detector.
- bunch of other small stuff ( email me when a battery is getting low etc)

I don't have any z-wave thermostats although a lot of folks use them.