So there are “Granular Control” that you need the native platform doesn’t provide, therefore you need access to add these “Granular Controls” yourself…
I believe, we should give our users full granular control, therefore would love to see all the requests so that we can push it in to our development.
On the other hand, it might not be practical (although we should still try) and therefore allow users to to add these controls by writing their own code.
We have re-architected a whole new way of adding “Plug -ins” we hope to launch this year (fingers crossed), whereby you can write your Lua code…and upload it either to your private space or public marketplace. I am hoping this Plugin capability should give you good control. If there is some capability that is not provided by this plugin, you just let us know, we’ll put it thru our dev and provide the functionality.
to Summarize:
1)Please tell us all the use cases (no matter how edge case they may be) so that we can put these as development items into our development roadmap (this is important because there will be others who might need these granular controls but not be able to write code)
2)Would love to hear your feedback if the plugin framework we’ll be launching is sufficient or not for your needs so that we can further develop it if need be. (we will announce it here in the forums).
Yes, I feel it’s safe to say, that a closed system will lose you the a lot of the key people who will help you innovate the platform - Vera in my mind was only ever the success it was because of the community that invested time/effort to make it better.
I appreciate some people will like a closed/proprietary system/set up, which is fine, but real innovation, real progress will be citizen developers and a vibrant (non judgemental) community
I knew nothing about Lua when I started out, but it soon became clear that Vera couldn’t do certain things (admittedly I’m going back to life with a Vera 2, 3 here) - the community was the sole reason why I choose and have stuck with the product, and have been a loyal customer for so many years.
But, I’m at a crossroad now, as things have moved on and there are so many more HA products/services on the market now to choose from - and for me ezlo lives/dies by it’s granular controls (customisation/personalisation) and its community. (If I had relieved solely on official tech support, no matter how good and necessary it was at time, so much of what I needed was provided by my virtual friends here, they helped me through it all) - and I’m doing what I can now to pay that support forward (albeit with the limited skills I have)
What started out as a single Vera system 10+ years ago, is now a mesh of interconnected tools (docker containers) but Vera has always remained at the centre… For how long, that’s up to you/ezlo to decide
For me its not a question of an Open or Closed system. It should always be an open system imo…but the question is: How much of the granular control should be natively provided, and what kind of framework should we provide so that Open system can be expanded with ease.
I would say as much as possible - that’s the only way the community can fully explore and exploit the platforms potential. Making it a win-win for all concerned.
At the same time there are always going to be people that want an easy, least complex as possible approach. I personally like the way in which people can ‘enable’ that feature, in a similar way to testing beta releases etc. (like the ability on Vera today to run potentially unsafe Lua code)
I actually ended up buying a second Vera for the purpose of testing my code, allowing me to attempt my own Vera widgets and plug-ins.
As for the framework if Lua and Linux is the basis to build upon, then being able to install packages and upload your own Lua files etc. would be necessary. SMB/CIFS was a glaring omission in Vera it took the community to work out and open that up. Now I link my Vera to my NAS to do logging, retrieve locally hosted files, local backup etc.
Being able to create trust (exchange rsa-keys) with other devices on my network i has been a blessing too, I’m now able to have my VeraPlus remotely reboot devices when they notice a problem (e.g Internet Router, raspberry Pis not responding etc)
I know opening up the device to customisation comes with a risk, but if the firmware is sound and there is the ability to restore from a backup - then the risk overall is minimal - yet the potential gains becomes so much more…
As you are no doubt aware; over the years people like, @Ap15e , @guessed , futzle, @RichardTSchaefer , @lolodomo@akbooer , @RexBeckett , @rigpapa , @reneboer@therealdb, a-lurker @rafale77, etc. (sorry if I missed anyone I’m going from memory) have added so much to the platform mostly for free to keep users like me interested. Without people like that I expect I would’ve been lured away to another platform and would not be hear pondering the ezlo experience.
which Plugins should we develop so that community can use them to build their own applications?
1)SMB/CIFS
2)HTTP
3)MQTT
What else?
As I mentioned previously, we re-architected the whole plugin framework to make it much more practical to use and develop in/for and setup a Plug in team internally to build the basic plugins so that our community has a good enough starting point.
Any guidance as to which plugins would be useful would be much appreciated.
Philips Hue plugin for me ! So I can keep my Hue lights paired to the Hue Bridge and just have the Ezlo hub control them via the local Hue API, like the existing Vera Hue plugins work today.
And maybe Harmony but that is EOL damn you Logitech
You have been asking the community to provide information on needed plugins and from that a list was composed (I don’t remember exactly and couldn’t find the “poll” used).
Now we start this process over? Why?
SMB/CIFS requirement wasn’t covered in the initial round that you refer to. So I thought its best to validate again, since we rebuilt the plugin framework and want to make sure to provide what is relevant to our users.
Also: we now have a brand new “Cloud Integration” framework that allows us to integrate any cloud services/applications
You can see how “Weather” is integrated under Services…
Plugin for us is what can be done locally. (Like the Vera Bridge etc)
So want to make sure to get the latest requirements and make sure to separate what is Cloud vs Local (Plugin) integrations and so on…
Can you be more specific taking the above example on Hue lights? Just like cw-kid I prefer local over cloud control. So a bit more clarity is needed to decide on preferred plugins.
I tried the Weather one doesn’t seem to do anything as yet? I clicked the Enroll button it thinks about it for a while counting down seconds and then I just get the same dialogue box again
There are third party platforms like IFTTT, Zapier and so on, and there is a company called NuCAL. Ezlo has partnered with NuCAL so that Ezlo can offer IFTTT/Zapier like capabilities.
What that means is: Anything cloud based (Weather, twitter, google sheet etc etc) can now be easily integrated and be made available in “Trigger” and “Actions” in Ezlogic.
We no longer have to write a “Plugin” for this plugin for that when it comes to “cloud applications”.
Ezlogic team is finalizing the Authentication code so that each user can register their own accounts to use these services etc…(hope to enable it in Ezlogic by the year end)… you can see “some” of these services when you click on “Services”. They are not functional, because authentication needs to be finalized.
So we have one piece of software in our hub that connects to NuCAL and pulls everything they have for Ezlo. So we never need to write a plugin for “Cloud Applications”.
What we refer to as “Plugin” is what we can run inside our Edge Computer (hubs) and can connect to devices locally (or even can connect to anything cloud). However thanks to NuCAL we don’t need to unnecessarily write a “Twitter Plugin or Google Sheet plugin” since we can have that functionality from NuCAL anyway.
So we focus on other stuff (non Cloud Apps) like “Protocol Support” HTTP, or DSC plugin etc…all that stuff that does require plugin operating inside the edge computer (hub).
If we want a “Cloud App” that NuCAL doesn’t have, we ask them and they enable it for us…
If we want a “Plugin” for something like DSC Alarm Panel etc, we ask our Plugin team
Here are some of the Plugins our Plugin team has been assigned to do:
DSC Alarm panel Plugin
HTTP, TCP, UDP Plugin
Vera Bridge Plugin
[Protocols] MQTT Plugin
Home Assitant Local 3rd Party API Plugin
MyQ Plugin (Pls note, APIs are not officially supported, so we’ll see what we can do)
Smartthings Local Plugin
Philips Hue Plugin
Ecobee Plugin
Nest Plugin
Tempurpedic WiFi frame integration (Pls note, APIs are not officially supported, so we’ll see what we can do)
Please note: Smartthings integration is already provided by NuCAL
Also: What would be great, if you could…
tell us what capabilities of each you want to see in “Trigger” vs “Action” (helps us understand better)
For example: Sonos, most likely nothing in trigger but only in action…and so on…
and what “commands” are important to you in “action”…
This helps us focus the development in delivering Triggers and Actions that you really need first…then we can expand it, but it saves us development time so we are not waiting until “everything” is done, at least we can give you an integration thats good enough for what you need and so on.
