Coming from SmartThings, 1 week into it.

I assure you that is not the case

How do you mean?

Not all problems are reported here, or solved here, or can be found here in a reasonable time frame. A forum really isn;t a substitute for a bug tracker.

@Freddan101 - Bug trackers are useless to users. Vera had a public bug tracker not too long ago and it was discontinued because it was useless and was a resource suck to maintain it. Suppose there was another one. What would it do for you? Is there anything that you could do about it? Do you have access to Vera’s source code and if you did could you fix it? Would it make you feel better to know that your favorite bug, a show stopper for you but no one else on the planet, has been deprioritized or marked ‘will not fix’ and cause you to post threads like this one ranting that your favorite bug has been outstanding for six months and you’re outraged? Bug trackers are utterly pointless for users.

If you want to see an illustration of publicly unknown issues that @intveltr is talking about, just have a look at the change log for a recent firmware release. There will be dozens of fixed issues that you never knew existed and that were never discussed on the forum or anywhere else outside of the company. There’s absolutely zero need or value to publicly post what are likely thousands of bugs, as is the case in any complicated software, that have little or no impact on most users.

@Z-Waver - You might be right. I’m just reaching for some kind of way getting the feeling that something is actually going on at Vera Ltd. I guess if Vera staff, like Marc here, would be a bit more active in the forum that would be a way to give that “we care” feeling. Just like the one I got when I saw Marc’s post.

[quote=“Freddan101, post:17, topic:191563”]@Marc - I don’t think being transparent with the top user issues you have acknowledged and are working on will hurt you. Explain how. What could hurt would be to share new features to come and that’s not what we’re talking about here.

You really need to work closer with the most important plugin developers and put some time and priority into that. Without Pleg for example Vera would be pretty bleak. Look at this issue that is very urgent to us.

Vera3 regularly restarts and reboots. PLEG memory issues?
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=36593

I’ve been a Vera user for seveal years. As a tech guy I can take a lot of pain regaring things that don’t work perfectly and that need tweaking. But I’m getting close to the point where I don’t want to put all time into trying to fix issues instead of a actually expanding and enjoying my system.[/quote]

We do work with the development community, especially with Richard from PLEG; Richard pretty much has a Bat phone to us. The Vera3 is a fairly old platform with limited memory. In the tread you point at above, Richard rightly suggests using a USB stick to store logs; this frees up memory in the controller. When the controller runs out of memory it usually reboots. If you don’t need verbose logging on, turn it off, it takes up memory and processing cycles.

The topic also came up in the other thread about the network connection. One of the uses of the network connection, even when you’re not actively downloading is used to automatically backup your configuration and your logs daily. It also syncs the clock. Every time the controller reboots, the clock if offline for a few minutes; over a long period of time without a internet connection it can get out of sync.

Freddan, I/we do the best we can to be active in the forum. I could spend days in the forum and not see everything. There is just too much. If there is ever an issue that you come across and want to know if we know about it email me. If you think there is a thread that we should see, email it to me.

It has been over a month since the this thread was started. I thought there might be an update by now, but no.

Chris your right a month since this thread, but it’s been 4 months since any update was released at all. Even Beta updates seemed to have stopped. You would assume there is no problems or issues to fix. They also lead you to believe that it takes time to put out a quality update, which you would assume will be awesome and fix a majority of the issues since its been months. I guess we will have to see. ;D

I waited patiently for the Vera Plus. I waited for firmware to support the devices I have. It is unfortunate that Vera hyped this product and never delivered on their claims. I am not waiting any longer. Time to pull the plug and moving on.

I guess there’s a revolving door here for users! As ChrisK bows out, I am anticipating the arrival of my first Vera product (the VeraPlus). I’m reading posts here that comment on issues that users are encountering. I find it enlightening. However, the same (but different) issues were present in my previous HA system.
Documentation, as in user guides, is significantly better here, something a newcomer appreciates. I’m very happy to see Marc from Vera involved here. The last HA system had wonderful support, I just hope Vera measures up.

@XA44Owq26HxCq88, I am not leaving Vera, just giving up with my Vera Plus, it is just too frustrating. I still have my Vera Lite, and I like it a lot and will continue to use it.

I have yet to find the perfect system. It seems many of the affordable systems have their good points, but also some major downsides. I really like the fact that the Vera Lite is not bound to some cloud services. It is a little under powered though. And I really like the mobile app HomeWave for Vera that runs on iOS devices.

But that leaves me with a problem, some devices in my network couldn’t talk. To fill a void that I had hoped the Plus would take care of, I purchased a Smartthings hub. It was a bit of work but now I have the Vera Lite and Smarttings talking to each other via openHab. Vera takes care of Z-Wave, which it is very good at. Smarttings takes care of ZigBee, which it does very well. And it all shows up on my iOS device using HomeWave. If anyone cares, Smartthings has local LAN control now.

Well, this is a very illuminating exchange and, for me, actually quite encouraging. I was beginning to wonder whether or not Vera was going to be around in 3 years time. It may not be but at least it sounds like the company has a real desire to develop and improve Vera so, hopefully, I have landed on a long term platform that is worth my set-up effort (not to mention my cash). I too have had many frustrations with my Vera Edge (only been using this for 8 months) but one of the worst has been the lack of good documentation. People on this forum are very helpful but, as with all forums, the help is not always entirely accurate or is contradictory. During my learning curve it has been, and is, very important for me to be able to recover my system back to a stable version but even the process of backing up, resetting the unit and falling back to a known good version does not seem to be documented anywhere other than by various questions and part-answers in the forum.

[quote=“XA44Owq26HxCq88, post:31, topic:191563”] Documentation, as in user guides, is significantly better here[/quote]I can’t begin to imagine how bad your former system’s documentation must have been.

[quote=“SteveH2, post:33, topic:191563”]I was beginning to wonder whether or not Vera was going to be around in 3 years time.[/quote]Unless MiOS gets acquired, in which case all bets are off, I’m very confident that Vera will be around in three years. Will they be a niche product or a market leader? That I can’t be sure of.

Regardless of what happens to the company, your Vera will still continue to work as it already does.

Z-Waver, as a company we believe that our approach to what we do is different; we set out to democratize this category and make automation affordable for normal people. When MiOS, MCV and Vera began, there were no reasonably priced options available that allowed a real level of integration or automaton and we still don’t nor do we intend to charge a monthly fee for the level of control that we curretnly provide and we still provide Customer Care at no charge for as long as you have our controller. We remain true to those ideals today and they are what continue to guide us as a company. Many companies in our space have come and gone, they have changed how they do things, eliminated fees, changed the location of their logic… all in response how the oldest player in this space has been and continues to be true to how they do things.

We have grown significantly this year, and we will continue to. Have there been bumps in the road, sure, will there be in the future? We hope not. As we grow we continue to grow we constantly evaluate and adjust the processes we have in place to ultimately insure a better product for our users.

With the strategic investment that was just made in our company, things are going to get exciting!

My (soon to be) previous system had NO documentation that I could find, so anything is an improvement. I may use it as a secondary hub, but that’s a low priority, seeing as how I have all zwave stuff. I love the local control aspect of vera. I can’t wait to explore the possibilities. I see that there is a plug in for the old X-10 system, I’ve had that for many many year. What is the Homewave that you are referring to?

HomeWave is a mobile app to control your Vera. It runs on iOS. You can learn more about under the topic Remote Control. I love it, and it is part of the reason I stay with Vera.

From a development standpoint, I thought Smartthings documentation was quite good. Documentation at Vera is a cluttered mess. Mark has been doing good things to improve new things. The community here is a huge asset and without it, I don’t know how you would figure things out.

I found the online group from my previous HA hub and found them to be invaluable. That’s why I’m here, trying to prevent my first experience with VP from being a frustrating event. (At least no too frustrating). I checked out HomeWave, is there a version for android? I couldn’t find it.

On another note, is there a way to bypass the verification questions when I try to submit notes here?

Homewave is not available on Android. I recommend that you check out Imperihome which has support for many different systems.

The verification questions will disappear after a few posts.

[quote=“XA44Owq26HxCq88, post:38, topic:191563”]I found the online group from my previous HA hub and found them to be invaluable. That’s why I’m here, trying to prevent my first experience with VP from being a frustrating event. (At least no too frustrating). I checked out HomeWave, is there a version for android? I couldn’t find it.

On another note, is there a way to bypass the verification questions when I try to submit notes here?[/quote]

Homewave is only ios… Imperihome is the next best and its for both Android and ios, but it was originally made for Android and it’s Android version is far ahead of it’s ios version.