Immediate Dashboard access remotely

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Is there a way to go to a URL on a remote browser, enter a login/pass on that same screen, and be taken instantly to the Dashboard (with the light/scene control buttons)?

Right now, if I go to cp.mios.com, after I login, I have to click the dashboard button before it takes me to the dashboard. Is there another URL I can enter into my browser in order to eliminate this extra step?

thanks!

2

hmmm… you could create a VPN tunnel with your router/firewall (if you have one) then assign vera a static ip address and map that to a specific port allowing you access to it remotely through your VPN.

3

I do something similar to what iflym3 is suggesting.

My home router/firewall is a Linksys WRT350N that I flashed with DDWRT. I configured the VPN functionality in DDWRT and then set up my iPhone client to connect to the VPN. I can open up the web console directly in Safari and avoid cp.mios.com completely. It also works well with SQ Remote allowing me to directly connect.

4

Woh, too complicated. Seriously, the web interface to control your HA system should be clean and usable. The change from UI3 to UI4 was a big improvement, but the whole system feels more like a low-level hack tool for programmers than a mainstream simple solution for “everyone.” At the end of the day, when all the fancy system configuration is done, this is a home automation system! People want a remote interface that lets them log on and start turning on and off lights! I hope MCV figures this out if they expect Vera to be more mainstream.

5

To me personally, that’s just a remote control system. The novelty wears off quickly! In terms of remote control, all I really want is a “I’m coming home early, adjust HVAC and get ready for me” button.

What I really want is home automation! That is some Boolean logic and event triggers so that “if A and B but not C during night time do X”. Right now, even the very simplest of such tasks requires learning some LUA and the ‘LUUP API’.

6

If you have a device or phone that supports one of the many apps available for different mobile platforms, you be able to use the app to get near instant access. I think the whole point about the Vera UI is that it is a webpage, so it requires the typical log in through their servers to be secure. If you want it faster, or with less steps, then you need some kind of native app already running on the remote computer/device to make access quick (auto secure login, remembers passwords, provides UI, etc). Luckily there are a lot of free options, too.

7

I would have to concur with shady on this one. My opinion is that the intranet page part of Vera is the background noise or configuration aspect of Vera. The page was never meant to be used as a controller. There are a lot of free apps that you can use to control Vera remotely. My favorite is Home Buddy! I love that app, mann. :slight_smile: (Donate, Donate to Rakstar!) Besides my Android phone, I also have Home Buddy on a rooted Coby Kyros 7" Touchscreen Tablet that I picked up from Wally World for 130 beans and mounted to my wall. You can tell Vera’s intranet page or UI is not meant to be a controller by the lame design layout. The layout is more driven towards setting things up and testing things out, which is great.

I don’t like the page or UI of Vera much at all myself, you can see many examples of this throughout this forum. lol. It doesn’t offer a lot of options compared to the Lua Engine that Vera was built from (have to keep this in mind too because most of what Vera can do you are really going to have to learn LUA to accomplish). That being said, i really don’t care what the UI looks like as long as it can do the job, do it quickly, and with as less effort as possible. The GUI should be simplistic, streamlined, and straight forward. Much like Homeseer’s HS2 Pro Interface, very nice Homeseer. Thats a good GUI to get the job done.

8

Hi,

Going through cp.mios.com/findvera.com assures you that a session is established. This way, you won’t have anyone just grab the URL for your session and access your unit. We took the security very serious and we will always have. Like other forum members posted, there are a lot of ways to get the Dashboard of Vera loaded without going through the portal. The easiest, in my opinion, is to forward a port of your router to the 80 port of Vera and then check the box what says “Require local http authentication” in Settings on cp.mios.com (this will enable HTTP authentication with the username and pass you use on cp.mios.com). The VPN is a solution also, a better one. Then, like others mentioned, all the apps for Android, iOS which are there to use with Vera/MiOS.

@iflyM3: A lot of stuff will be added to Vera, like logic statements (AND, OR, If…), but we’re still working on making Vera stable enough to afford implementing those. We’re almost there and one of the main issues (Z-Wave chipset related, not Vera) is almost fixed. Ask the beta testers and you will see how much work has been done lately.

Thanks!

9

@mcvovidiu

Oh, this is great news! I cannot wait to see the logical conditional’s (AND, Or, If…) implemented into the GUI of Vera. This alone would substantially increase the efficiency, and user friendliness of Vera and in turn increase both customer retention and sales. Vera by far is the cheapest gateway, thousands of dollars less then both Homeseer and Crestron. Vera definitely has the potential to be something big and it’s very affordable. I really hope that MiCasaVerde pulls it off. Don’t get me wrong, I like my Vera very much so.
I do see the potential that exists in the Lua engine, by some of the things (events, scenes, custom plugins) that the more tenor and senior Vera users are able to create utilizing Lua. If some of this could get implemented into the GUI so that csr’s would not have to learn Lua then this would be extremely incredible and Vera would be one super awesome Home Automation controller above the rest thats out there on the market.
Yes, I’ve read about the Z-Wave Network issue with the dead end node paths (not Vera related, but Z-Wave chipset related) and that the issue there is close to being resolved. This is all great news.