mark_anderson_us
Member
Hi Petepete_c said:Quickie synopsis to date and just relating to the creation of a "touch screen" and maybe cuz I have used it for a number of years; Homeseer Touch designer even with its nuances (bugs) is fastest methodology to create a touch screen in the Android and Wintel and Linux world. I get carried away sometimes with it wanting identical screens in all three OS's; guess just relating to some uniformity.
I am too totally managing my touchscreens from the mothership and vice versa. While testing wireless I am not dependent on wireless consoles in my home today; never have been. Tablets are tablets here and used mostly as an interface to the internet rather than consoles to my automation; but that is me.
For whatever reason not addressing the esthetics of the screens over the function and response times. (this is that low WAF thing about too many variables on one touch screen). IE: touch response times not connected to the mothership server and running scripts autonomously is really fast. Elve is doing well right now relating to response times connecting to my HAI OPII panel (well and running it on wintel).
I have multiple means of consoles (touchscreens) today and mostly look at how many weather maps, temperature variables et al I can fit on one screen.
Meanwhile I would be very interested in what you find and what you decide to do relating to your home automation Mark.
I am in a bit of a bit of a "literal" cynical mood today; not relating to automation though.
I agree with you about wireless. I would love to avoid it, but without something like POE support for iOS devices (my preferred device), I'm hosed. That being said, I made sure I have excellent coverage. Each floor is only about 600sq ft and have wireless router or access point on each.If I could find a good looking wall mounted tablet that connected to server via cable for around $200-$250 I would have used them. I think the ones HS sells look pretty awful. I have to say my iPad min's (gen 1) are so much faster than Kindle fires (original models). Probably not a fair comparison as the fire's are probably a year older.
I do agree about HStouch for the most part (especially looking at Indigo's offering ) The amount of stuff you can do is remarkable. What really frustrates me is when I go to do a 10 minute job and ends up being 2 hours. Once I get into it, I just get on and do it, but the problem is it creates inertia: I looked at 7 day weather saying "Text" on my touch screens for a good 6-8 weeks: partly because I was busy with other stuff, but mostly because I knew it was gonna be a PITA to update about 50 objects in each project. Buying UltraWeather (bought it some months ago) was the best thing I did regarding weather.Now I have a bunch of devices on screen and a backend pointing to those. This is where HS really falls down: suggesting using RSS objects in the UI for weather is just crazy. You'd be far better off writing a script to retrieve the RSS data and populating variables that can then be hooked up to the UI. This way, when the weather service changes, you update the script and never touch the UI. Of course, when you've just bought HS, you don't realize this and assume the documentation is promoting best practices. Out of date and lacking documentation is really frustrating too. What's annoying about this, is that they have a phenomenal community. I, and i'm sure many others, would contribute to documentation if they made it available (e.g. in a wiki). Even keeping control of the content, but using an up to date help system that allows community feedback would be a great help. They definitely seem stuck in 20th century.
My drive towards an HTML client is 3 fold:
- Improve Javascript and MVC framework knowledge (learning Angular now)
- Tired of being stuck with tools provided by vendors and pedestrian update cycles - sure they get you 80% of the way there, but over time, I think it's natural to aim for 100%
- There's such a rich pool of widgets/components to choose from in the HTML world and I know I can build a single project that adapts to viewports from phone to 30" monitor.
OpenHAB is looking promising. I like the idea of independent add-ons (e.g. can install an improved z-wave module easily). Not wild about the tools, so far, but I only have about 2 hours under my belt. Designer seems to do nothing other than give you a pretty view of the files, some syntax checking and browser pane (unless I'm missing something).
habmin seems a little better: lets you add items, but does remove all formatting from cfg file and resulted in syntax errors
I think I read somewhere that v2 of OpenHAB will have much better tools for admin
Anyway, will post updates, as and when I have things to report.
Regards
mark