just ordered a Smartthings hub. Vera is killing me

I don’t know if it’s going to be any better, but I’v just ordered a Smartthings hub. I’ve had the Veralite for a couple years and I can’t really calculate the amount of time it has cost me. I’m hoping to preserve what sanity I have left and get something that actually works with simple remotes like the ge45600; something that doesn’t kill itself every time one does an upgrade, something that doesn’t send me countless emails for alerts, rather than just one, something that doesn’t have an app that has a “thank you for your patience” screen everytime you start it up… sometimes never to leave.

We shall see.

Pls come back and let us know how you get on.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Coming from someone that has tried to change before. Nothing works 100% each have some issue. Depending on your devices and plugins you might be ok or you might find that support doesn’t exist at all vs. a half broken support.

The first 4 reviews sound just like VERA.

Let us know if you find that pot of gold.

I spent so…and bought Fibaro…
one day of tests and I see my Vera3 is not the monster I thought…

Today my vera3 system is stable, expect with a problem with global cache itach occurs me today…

And the Fibaro, with an app with 500mb and one unique interface…that is strange for me…
I have one Fibaro brand new for sale at half of the market price…

Sounds like a race to the bottom :frowning:

I’ve tried to walk on the greener grass and it just didn’t work out. I still run the Smart Things [v1] unit for my Fibaro devices (I’m still UI5) - pushing data to Vera but once UI7 is stable it’s getting donated to a family member.

I have started shifting everything I can away from Vera. Believe it or not. the best thing that I have been using. Is eventghost. Damn thing is easy to code for simple to add events and actions (for anything you want. not dictated by some other company). If you put a pressure switch on your toilet seat and a robotic arm next to you. you could get it to wipe your backside when ya got up. very easily. Not relying on proprietary hardware. it even runs on android phones LOL. you can do in 2 lines of code what would be 2 pages worth with the vera. They need to take some pointers from the guy who developed Eventghost. My vera 3 runs on avg i think about 1.5% on the cpu. and if ya felt the thing you would think different from the heat. And there is no way that thing could sustain a 50% without overheating. Arduinos and Eventghost. 9.99 and it does what a global cache itach does and that thing costs 120. I just started messin with those Arduinos. and took me about 4 hours to learn the Code it uses Partially c++ and code up the rs 232 for my samsung TV over bluetooth with TTl serial and I am not a programmer. Oh yeah with it also controlling 4 Relays and a couple of temp sensors so my gas fireplaces can now turn on and off at different tempetatures. And there isn’t a single company that I could find that Just sells a zwave temp sensor. I got one. Not zwave but it is wireless. temp sensor .90 cents 9.99 for the Arduino. and it runs on batteries. They even have the PIR sensor for those thing. and it’s tiny maybe the size of a quater everything i have seen retail is HUGE i don’t want that hangin on my wall.

Notes on my migration to Smartthings.

The positives:

Device inclusion works very well.

  1. Big thing – SmartThings allows remotes like the GE45600 to work PERFECTLY! I’m no longer locked into merely triggering scenes. I can turn lights on and off individually, or all together. The 45600 can actually be used to ‘dim’ a light, rather than just turn it on and off. WOW! This means I get to stay married because we have working remotes in the house… we can actually turn lights on and off (not all of them have wall switches)

  2. The bane of my existence, the universal remote ‘Monster AVL300’ - hooked up to the smarthings network without having to jump through hoops during a full moon while reciting incantations. All that and more was required with the Vera. Oh, and with the vera, the AVL300 would disappear and one would have to have faith that it was still in the system.

  3. Smartthings can push notifications to my iPhone as well as txts. The txts actually look like txts, not some microfiche HTML sent to txt. It doesn’t double and triple them up.

  4. geo fencing built into the app.

Cons -

  1. As far as I can tell, Smartthings is entirely app based at this point. I really hope they get a Web UI of some sort.

  2. The app sucks and I haven’t found any third party apps. That is a nice thing with vera because - well, their app also sucks, but at least there’s a third party app that works better. (veramate)

  3. The app sucks. Oh yeah, I already wrote that. Worth writing again.

Hopefully, SmartThings will improve their app soon. It really needs serious UI work. I’m willing to give it time because at this point, Vera has had three years of my life. Vera DOES have a deeper base and I suppose could be THEORETICALLY better… but so many problems with GE/Jasco Wayne Dalton, remotes really killed me. I know it sounds trivial but when that’s the primary way you turn on and off lights, it’s important.

I’m keeping my vera for now, see what changes happen – but I’m not really holding my breath. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three hundred and fourteen times, shame on me.

For a UI, take a look at the Action Dashboard (now @ 5.1) w/smart tiles. You can access it on the web which make’s it usable for things like an iPad or Android device.

[quote=“stefan1968, post:8, topic:186506”]Notes on my migration to Smartthings.

The positives:

Device inclusion works very well.

  1. Big thing – SmartThings allows remotes like the GE45600 to work PERFECTLY! I’m no longer locked into merely triggering scenes. I can turn lights on and off individually, or all together. The 45600 can actually be used to ‘dim’ a light, rather than just turn it on and off. WOW! This means I get to stay married because we have working remotes in the house… we can actually turn lights on and off (not all of them have wall switches)

  2. The bane of my existence, the universal remote ‘Monster AVL300’ - hooked up to the smarthings network without having to jump through hoops during a full moon while reciting incantations. All that and more was required with the Vera. Oh, and with the vera, the AVL300 would disappear and one would have to have faith that it was still in the system.

  3. Smartthings can push notifications to my iPhone as well as txts. The txts actually look like txts, not some microfiche HTML sent to txt. It doesn’t double and triple them up.

  4. geo fencing built into the app.

Cons -

  1. As far as I can tell, Smartthings is entirely app based at this point. I really hope they get a Web UI of some sort.

  2. The app sucks and I haven’t found any third party apps. That is a nice thing with vera because - well, their app also sucks, but at least there’s a third party app that works better. (veramate)

  3. The app sucks. Oh yeah, I already wrote that. Worth writing again.

Hopefully, SmartThings will improve their app soon. It really needs serious UI work. I’m willing to give it time because at this point, Vera has had three years of my life. Vera DOES have a deeper base and I suppose could be THEORETICALLY better… but so many problems with GE/Jasco Wayne Dalton, remotes really killed me. I know it sounds trivial but when that’s the primary way you turn on and off lights, it’s important.

I’m keeping my vera for now, see what changes happen – but I’m not really holding my breath. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three hundred and fourteen times, shame on me.[/quote]

Have you had any issues with the “cloud” logic? That is the 1 major detractor for me and smart things. I know they are supposed to fix it, but I didn’t think it was fixed yet.

They haven’t… It’s supposed to be in the next hardware or Verison 2, but that’s was widely talked about at CES and months later no one has even confirmed a version 2 is in the works or when it will be out. So just a big rumor for now.

Holy camoly! Thank you CudaNet! That app is definitely a step in the right direction!

You’re very welcome…

I'm keeping my vera for now, see what changes happen -- but I'm not really holding my breath. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three hundred and fourteen times, shame on me.

And that my friends sums up the Vera experience perfectly.

[quote=“TC1, post:14, topic:186506”]

I’m keeping my vera for now, see what changes happen – but I’m not really holding my breath. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three hundred and fourteen times, shame on me.

And that my friends sums up the Vera experience perfectly.[/quote]

Amen.

(As in divine intervention is needed to stabilize Vera.)

So, after a couple weeks with SmartThings I gotta say - I’m having a much better time of it than with the Veralite.
Yes the lag with the cloud based app is a little annoying, but things work and connect easily.

They need to redo their UI. It is no good. They need to localize control (which I understand is happening in v2 of the hub)
and they need to add more camera support.

But man – my stress levels are way lower now.

Sigh…after reading this thread, I’m starting to regret buying the Vera Edge last night. Should I cancel and get a smartthings hub instead?? I only have around 6 or 7 z-wave devices atm.

IF you want to move to SmartThings, wait for V2 of their hub…

couple interesting articles, I was not aware that Samsung bought smartthings

says Q3 for v2 though…

.

As someone who is fed up with Vera, I should offer my experience with Smartthings, Wink, and InControl HA running on an Aeon Labs ZStick:

I’m regretfully slinking back to my Vera.

Smartthings: the app is pretty, but an utter nightmare. Things are in two places, icons take up too much space, and as far as I could see there was no way to set up a scene where you specify individual dim levels for each light in the scene. That nonsense was the dealbreaker for me. Sure, the users there will tell you that there are apps available to do that, but the app experience was a PITA and this should be an out-of-the-box feature.

Wink: doesn’t support nearly enough devices, and the app has icons that nearly beat out Vera’s UI7 app for how big everything is (nothing beats Vera in this category, though). It’s a very simplistic platform which is a shame. If those icons were smaller and they had supported the Aeon Labs Minimote, I probably would be a Wink household right now.

ZStick w/InControl: shudder where do I start? Completely unreliable, constant scene/communication failures, have to dedicate a Windows computer to it… This is a no-go setup, which is a shame because I love the idea of it, and InControl has some design decisions they’ve made that are miles ahead of where Vera has ended up. Still, I just couldn’t get everything to work.

So now I’m getting ready to migrate back to my Vera Lite UI5 and hope that I can recreate my network and get it stable this time…