Linux Based version will run on the current hardware our users have.
Plugin support is being coded as we speak. I don’t have an exact date, but hoping to deliver it by the year end (don’t hold me to it as its just a guesstimate).
Any “new” Vera is useless to me without support for existing plugins!
I am beginning to wonder why the system is being “recoded” - it was not broken.
Perhaps you should provide a plan and direction document for those of us who are heavy Vera users.
If such a document exists - where is it?
It appears from many of the posts that some users are already planning to abandon Vera for other platforms.
I applaud their efforts to bring the system up to bleeding-edge/modern standards. Developers have dealt with a long litany of limitations; I’m not even talking about any bugs, I’m referring to basic architecture and implementation choices that may have made sense ten years ago, but don’t now. A deep, hard cut like this is brave, and if they pull it off, heroic.
As for the plugins, there are too many dead and unsupported plugins. If the new firmware has different interfaces or enforces new rules that require developer support to work on the new firmware, it will immediately separate wheat from chaff. The community can then focus clearly on addressing what may have been excluded that is still needed. But I’ve often said that the current app marketplace is a harrowing minefield of unsupported, non-working, and sometimes harmful offerings that do nothing to help new users get comfortable with the platform, and in fact, have quite the opposite effect. Time for those to go. Past time.
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I would like to point out that the biggest problem I have run into with my Vera Plus installation is it not playing well with Zwave devices.
I am NOT AT ALL interested in buying devices from the Vera Store. Not only do I dislike many of the designs everything on there is much more expensive than I can get on the open market.
Right now I have 2 Zwave sensors from BeSense. One is a motion the other a door open/close. When armed both periodically at random intervals send tamper warnings even though they are not being tampered with. These are NOT sold in the Vera Store and the motion sensors that are are $15-$20 more expensive.
BeSense has no idea they claim they don’t see this with their testing on their Vera but they are obviously testing with older code.
Before anyone spews “if you want reliability buy from the vera store” I will point out that the ENTIRE POINT of open standards like Zwave is to allow things to play together. If you are a proponent of a “walled garden” in networking then I hope you remember that next time you can’t get your laptop to work in a coffeeshop and the shop says “only laptops bought off our website where we get a commission will work”
Vera seems little interested in testing devices and adding in “exceptions” to the Vera hub to make them work well unless they can sell these devices and make a commission.
I will also point out that what good is an automated home system if you cannot put sensors and actuators -everywhere- And that’s possible if the sensors are $10 or so but bank-breaking for $60 a pop sensors.
Microsoft Windows got where it is today because in the early days Microsoft went to the trouble of getting EVERY oddball piece of hardware and making sure it worked even when the manufacturer was long gone. CGA & HGC cards (through windows 3.0) and all sorts of old skankyfloppy controller tape drives and other nasty hardware was all tested and Windows modified to support. Vera needs to learn from this example.
We don’t need the kernel continually rewritten we need support expanded.
To your point of zwave being an open standard… I hope you see the paradox in your post… In order for the Besense sensors to misbehave on the vera… it is more than likely that they are not following the standard. I too have encountered some weirdness with various sensors at times but discovered now that they were not properly configured because these sensors needed to be setup with security classes and were not.
Besides these singular devices, I had the best luck with non officially supported devices on zwave. As a matter of fact, over half of my 143 zwave devices are not supported or were included and configured while they were not officially supported. Once the devices became supported, is when the mess came in as the vera tries too hard to run automated configurations which sometimes sets it up to go into infinite luup of device creation, luup reload, automated device deletion, luup reload, device creation…
So for your sensors… either they are not conforming to zwave standard stacks (some brands do it because they themselves have a controller which supports it) or your inclusion needs to be redone with security and this is something the vera struggles with for some devices because… as I discovered, it may be too slow in its inclusion process and the device too fast in its sequencing.
Besides these one or two exceptions, the vera has supported every device I threw at it. Albeit with some manual configuration at times.
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OK, so users are expected to be able to do manual configuration. Is this manual configuration process available on the wiki? I suppose a user might be able to look at a devices ‘Capabilities’ variable and determine how to configure it manually. If there’s information on how to do that I’d like to have a look at it.
It’s a good point… It is not well documented outside of this forum but a bunch of folks here have experimented and demonstrated how to do it. It generally comes down to only associate the right device type and device file to the created device and usually doing it using ALTUI to avoid the dreadful automated luup reload at every parameter edit.
Hi, gang. I have not logged into the community in awhile and am checking in to see the new firmware. I have tried reading the posts but don’t see anything about it. Did I miss something? If I recall it was last August we were told to be patient and wait 6 months for it. Are we seriously approaching a year and we have nothing? I hope I am wrong and someone can kindly point me in the right direction. 
@randya What version are you on? eZLO released 1.7.4452 and 1.7.4453 for the Edge and Plus a few months back.
yes, I am on 1.7.4453 but was under the impression this was not the long awaited firmware. Am I wrong in thinking that? It didn’t seem to do much, unless it is all under the hood. But I thought the new stuff we are waiting for was backend, frontend, app… the whole package which is why we had to wait so long.
The firmware release was all about stability. The big rewrite is still in works per @melih and @Sorin. They may be able to provide more info as to when the new final rewrite will be out . A positive note is that the eZLO device is supposed to arrive today and I think that this is part of the new direction that they are going with the complete rewrite.
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Thank you for the information. I will be interested to hear how the new device works for you.
Melih, I’m sure it’s great, but understand that from the perspective of your current legacy user base, that product isn’t even capable enough for you or anyone else to reasonably judge how good its performance is. It just too basic right now, so much so that I don’t think any of us with 25, 50 or 100 devices has bothered to try, simply because our labs are our homes, and there’s a heavy cost to breaking a working, spouse-facing home automation system. It would be a fool’s errand, because it can’t replace what we already have, performance or not.
I’m sure Atom’s great day will come, but at the moment, it doesn’t address the needs of the primary consumers of this thread.
@rigpapa what its capable of vs legacy systems are two different issues.
You are saying you haven’t bothered to try, which is fine. That doesn’t make the product basic.
It is because it is basic that I haven’t tried. The current scene model is completely inadequate to implement the most basic things my family has come to expect from the system.
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I tried… I can’t do anything with it at the moment. I can’t comment on how good it is. I certainly appreciate the advanced notification and sharing. Don’t get me wrong. I think you are building something interesting. It is yet too early to judge or for any of us to provide you feedback on the device because… we already have built something with the old platform and… your new ones doesn’t fit in it and is not nearly as capable yet as the old. The transition will be a humongous challenge and even for early testing is just not a viable option at this point and certainly not a cost effective or time effective one.
I understand @rigpapa that you are using reactor and unless reactor works with ezlo you can’t use it because reactor has great capabilities etc. That still doesn’t make the zwave stack (which is the question I was answering, not the scene creation capability) it has “basic”.
The question i was answering is repeated below:
I remember the excitement we all felt reading the news of the Mios acquisition, but to tell The truth after 1yr and a half I’m not happy at all. There has been some stability improvement for sure, and some more devices are now supported, but as an end user I see many devices not supported or not working well, a complete drop on vera plus and Vera secure feature (zigbee still left behind, Bluetooth removed, the lack of security like S2 for a “secure” hub - so I’m wondering why I bought a VP) and a really slow firmware development.
I understand Ezlo is investing in new products, but right now The old one’s do not work properly (and there are more new devices that The one you are supporting) and the new one’s are far from beeing a replacement.
I remember Vera said they hired many more engineers, but splitting them on so many areas (backend, online services, Linux firmware, old firmware, iOS and Android apps) didn’t show a real change.
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I don’t know if you saw my post this morning about what worked and what didn’t with mios and overall I feel like you are redoing and changing a large part of what worked while not evidently doing anything about what didn’t.
Truth be told, with a lot of work and tweaking and a little help from your devs on changing, updating, refactoring the zwave and the zigbee stack, the old vera could be the benchmark on the market because of the great things about it: lua, the local UI and API which are much better than all the others I looked at. We could almost live with all the other idiotic defects on the rest of the firmware with hopes that they would get gradually fixed and would have community generated workarounds or enhancements.
When ezlo acquired mcv we were indeed excited about the perspective of some major changes but we are indeed almost 2 years down the road and starting something brand new has become more of a burden than excitement. Especially when it offers so little extra functionality if at all. It’s interesting but meh… we can already pretty much everything with open source software on much better hardware and more mature platforms. So why not just use what worked, enhance it, put new hardware out to improve on the same platform, evolve it rather than radically change everything? Just a thought.
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