I am wanting to get into home automation but have no idea a where to start and have a couple questions.
I currently have a nest thermostat and nest protect smoke detectors a day was hoping there would be some sort of announcement regarding home automation at Google i/o this year but no such luck. I also have a liftmaster garage door opener that I was planning on getting one of their myq modules for. I also have an adt pulse security system.
My question is, how would I go about integrating everything into one relatively simple solution. Obviously being here I know a lot of people will recommend the Vera light, but will I be able to get everything to talk to each other (the security system doesn’t have to be included)?
I don’t have any experience with the nest smoke detector, but I’ve been able to integrate my alarm system, nest thermostat and liftmaster myq all fairly painlessly. There are apps for the best thermostat and the myq opener that are pretty straight forward.
The alarm system was the most difficult, mainly because adt was a pain about giving me the security code (to my own freaking alarm…) to set up the spare keypad. Ended up having a service call and the guy who showed up was great–knew exactly what to do and had it up and working within about an hour of him leaving. I don’t have the pulse system, but have a vista alarm system monitored by adt. You may want to do a bit of searching here on your specific alarm system and see if there’s anything more complicated.
So yes, the vera should be able to do all of that. It takes some time to figure out how to do things, but with the myq and nest, it should be fairly easy.
I guess my question is more along the lines of is there a way to do all from one app with the Vera? Also I would love to be able to use voice controls through my phone.
[quote=“Jamesr913, post:3, topic:181773”]I guess my question is more along the lines of is there a way to do all from one app with the Vera? Also I would love to be able to use voice controls through my phone.
Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk[/quote]
Yes, that should be doable with one app, once everything is interfaced with vera. I haven’t played around with voice control, but I know there are people here working on this. If you look in the remotes section of the forum, you’ll find different apps users have developed for Apple and android systems. I use homewave and can control all of those items from my phone. Haven’t explored the android apps, but you can look at what’s available. I’ve found the user developed apps for the phone to be much better than the vera app itself.
If it were me, I might wait to see what comes of Apple’s announcement before I purchase any additional hardware.
Even though I’m not planning on buying anything from Apple, it’s possible their Homekit could have ramifications on other things.
[quote=“prim8, post:5, topic:181773”]If it were me, I might wait to see what comes of Apple’s announcement before I purchase any additional hardware.
Even though I’m not planning on buying anything from Apple, it’s possible their Homekit could have ramifications on other things.[/quote]
This is marketing win! Pure gold. Consumers paralyzed by rumors, announcements, and vaporware.
For the record, HomeKit is not a device product. It is a framework designed to facilitate IoS app developers effecting control over HA devices that conform to the framework’s instruction set. HomeKit is yet another abstraction layer in the command chain.
I never said Homekit was a device. We don’t know what Homekit is, that’s my issue. With Apple’s weight behind it, Homekit can make substantial changes to this market, and it’s likely many of them will be negative for many of us.
It’s quite possible someone buying a non complete solution now will regret it, if later new stuff isn’t compatible with old.
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