upstatemike
Senior Member
Over on the Homeseer forum I notice a lot of folks who are unhappy with some aspect of that product (usually the UI) making statements like "Homeseer better get their act together or they will be displaced by newer systems like Hubitat or Polisys." This has got me wondering if that is in any way actually possible so I thought I would put the question out there.
Some of the things that don't seem like they would transfer include:
Local TTS with different voice options. While I would love to have the option to do TTS through my Alexa devices for non-critical stuff I feel like local TTS is going to be important. Hubitat makes a big deal about keeping most stuff local without a cloud dependency yet they did not include an audio output jack and as far as I know do not offer local TTS to a LAN based voice client. I suppose either Hubitat or UDI (Polisys) could support local speach to Squeezbox clients or even Homeseer Voice clients but as far as I know they do not. There may be some support for using aonos Amp or Connect to feed a bunch of speakers but I'm not sure what that solution would involve or how reliable it would be.
Caller ID announce. First you have to resolve the local TTS question to have a place to announce caller ID to but then there is the question of what hardware interface would you use? I don't think either Hubitat or UDI are offering any options right now.
Distributed Z-Wave. Even though Z-Wave is billed a mesh network it seems like a lot of key features related to device associations only work when the devices involved are talking directly to the hub and not relaying through another device. In a large house ( or medium sized house really) you are never going to have all devices in range to talk to a central hub. Homeseer gets around this by offering a networked Z-Wave controller so you can set up multiple Z-Wave networks where everything talks directly to one hub or another. I don't see anything about how Hubitat or Polisys would tackle this.
Non-Protocol integrations. Homeseer has the ability to integrate a lot of things through serial ports or USB ports so you can get into RFXcom, serial control of AV equipment, talk to old Panasonic telephone systems, etc. The newer hubs seem to assume everything will either talk IP, Zigbee, or Z-Wave and when they talk about a wide variety of devices they really just mean variety of products supported within these limited few protocols.
These are just a few things off the top of my head but would like to hear if there s a way to address them with the newer hubs that I am just not seeing. Maybe I can be convinced that these could eventually replace Homeseer as my core automation platform but I'm not there yet.
Some of the things that don't seem like they would transfer include:
Local TTS with different voice options. While I would love to have the option to do TTS through my Alexa devices for non-critical stuff I feel like local TTS is going to be important. Hubitat makes a big deal about keeping most stuff local without a cloud dependency yet they did not include an audio output jack and as far as I know do not offer local TTS to a LAN based voice client. I suppose either Hubitat or UDI (Polisys) could support local speach to Squeezbox clients or even Homeseer Voice clients but as far as I know they do not. There may be some support for using aonos Amp or Connect to feed a bunch of speakers but I'm not sure what that solution would involve or how reliable it would be.
Caller ID announce. First you have to resolve the local TTS question to have a place to announce caller ID to but then there is the question of what hardware interface would you use? I don't think either Hubitat or UDI are offering any options right now.
Distributed Z-Wave. Even though Z-Wave is billed a mesh network it seems like a lot of key features related to device associations only work when the devices involved are talking directly to the hub and not relaying through another device. In a large house ( or medium sized house really) you are never going to have all devices in range to talk to a central hub. Homeseer gets around this by offering a networked Z-Wave controller so you can set up multiple Z-Wave networks where everything talks directly to one hub or another. I don't see anything about how Hubitat or Polisys would tackle this.
Non-Protocol integrations. Homeseer has the ability to integrate a lot of things through serial ports or USB ports so you can get into RFXcom, serial control of AV equipment, talk to old Panasonic telephone systems, etc. The newer hubs seem to assume everything will either talk IP, Zigbee, or Z-Wave and when they talk about a wide variety of devices they really just mean variety of products supported within these limited few protocols.
These are just a few things off the top of my head but would like to hear if there s a way to address them with the newer hubs that I am just not seeing. Maybe I can be convinced that these could eventually replace Homeseer as my core automation platform but I'm not there yet.