MCV is a Hong Kong owned company. Chinese companies well known for very poor customer service.
Most likely, as is with many companies these days, they just put out a cheap product to sell as many as they can knowing they will not get repeat customers and hoping the word will not get out that is only partly works and you’ll get no real support. For the most part they are right it seems… most of you bought the product, get crappy to no support but still keep coming back. I’ve seen some say “its the best on the market”… everyone has the right to their own opinion but ‘best’ in my ind would mean it had great support & customer service OR it worked perfectly - from what I’ve seen on the forum, neither are even close to being true.
Companies like MCV will never gain real market share unless another company OEMs the product, takes customer feedback to make improvements, and layers good customer service on top.
It is obvious MCV does not care about their customers - they don’t read (or respond) any forum posts.
It is obvious MCV does not care about their customers - they don't read (or respond) any forum posts.
Whilst there do appear to be some problems, in defence of MCV I feel I’ve had pretty good support from MCV on questions I’ve raised on Lua, Z-Wave and so forth…
For the cost of a Vera3 and your own development time you can get started. I thought about starting something like that as a pet project. I was thinking about doing a m0n0wall type (pfsense, freenas, ipcop, smoothwall, redwall, openwrt) project an converting it to an open distro for Z-Wave devices like Vera does. In this case you would have low cost fast hardware, and complete source code. One additional consideration was to run a Tomcat server and do a pure Java implementation instead of PHP.
Hardware Selected:
(1) $154.00 Foxconn Atom D425 1.8GHz/DDR3/V&GbE/65W PC Barebone System NT435-0H0W-B-A-NA
(1) $19.99 Corsair 4 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory CMSO4GX3M1A1333C9
(1) $59.99 Aeon Labs Z-Wave Z-Stick Series 2 USB Dongle http://www.aeon-labs.com/site/products/view/2/
(1) $20-$70 Either SD card or SSD drive for boot device. OCZ 60GB SATA 2.5" 3Gbps SSD
[quote=“marcoose, post:15, topic:169799”]I get to stay afloat they need to keep selling boxes, but it seems MCV thinks the only way to do that is with flashier and flashier UI updates. Even if that appeals to prospective customers, the word that it doesn’t work reliably is going to get out and kill sales.
I suspect there is a much larger market for a more “hackable”, very stable core engine than MCV thinks. If they slimmed down the UI back to a basic UI2, made the engine/API rock solid, and there was some space on the box for people to put their own UI pages/plugins, everyone who was into Arduino and that sort of thing would be buying a box to tinker with. Exposing the scheduler and some simple event-driven APIs would allow people to develop and publish their own Boolean logic plugins, scene managers, and all sorts of very specialized UIs. Plus it would be “community supported” and MCV wouldn’t have to do anything other than ensure the basic API’s worked. All downloads from the Vera Marketplace (which would start getting contributions) would be caveat emptor.[/quote]
@u20111223
That is a good idea but along that same vein maybe an even better idea is to use a low-cost NAS like Synology which already has a TON of support, a huge community, and is Linux based and can run Optware, PHP, Java, and MUCH more. You can buy a new 1-bay Synology for a bit over $100, I just bought a 2-bay for $199 from Amazon, shipped.
There has been talk of trying to get LinuxMCE working on Synology… I’d think a branched version with some of the more intensive media stuff ripped out would problably work fine as most of the code is C++
… Z-wave devices control from NAS or router
AND… I just found OpenZwave info to compile to run on Synology…
In my opinion, a good option would be for MCV to open source the code - or at least have a community version that could be worked on by those with the experience/inclination/time. I actually think this would be good for everyone - even MCV. MCV could keep their own code base if they wanted and pull across the community added code as/if/when they decided, but as a community we’d be able to progress some of the bugs that aren’t being fixed, and add on things that are commonly requested, but not high on MCVs hitlist. It would certainly be better (for MCV at least) than a break-away open source project.
I for one would be interested in working on this - I think the Vera is a good unit, and generally I have had good support from MCV. They clearly have other priorities, which I can possibly understand, although as a current user, don’t always support!.
unfortunately all my ezmotion 3-in-1 sensors stopped working correctly with UI5, in the sense that they don’t wakeup anymore or the temperature is not updated correctly…arrgghh!!! anybody having the same issue? i tried almost all logical things…
Sadly I don’t see an open-source Z-wave anything because of the restrictions imposed by Sigma/Zenesys. There is some pretty good reverse engineering going on in the OS community, but it will be really hard to handle the low-level network/config commands needed to get the network running. The basic on/off just doesn’t cut it when you start getting all the stupid routing errors. I think it was silly on Z-wave to bother with the “switch and remote is all you need” attempt at putting brains in the chip. It doesn’t need to work without a ‘real’ controller.
After upgrading to UI5 on vera 2 I've noticed that there is an (>2s) delay from the sensor capturing a motion until a light is turned on.
It used to be almost instant with the very same luup code on UI4. Has anyone else the same experience?
I can confirm this. I also do have an annoying delay since the last update on my Vera2. The delay is especially long when running scenes.
unfortunately all my ezmotion 3-in-1 sensors stopped working correctly with UI5, in the sense that they don't wakeup anymore or the temperature is not updated correctly....arrgghh!!! anybody having the same issue? i tried almost all logical things...
I can almost confirm this. I have two 3in1 ezmotion sensors in my network. since the last update the behave very strangely. It seems like they fall asleep from time to time and then never wake up again until the blue button is pushed on the sensors. Then the work normal “for some time”.
MicasaVerde should always provide a second vera for free to every customer, so that everybody can run a test environement to test their beta-firmware-releases. :-\
[quote=“Aaron, post:21, topic:169799”]MCV is a Hong Kong owned company. Chinese companies well known for very poor customer service.
Most likely, as is with many companies these days, they just put out a cheap product to sell as many as they can knowing they will not get repeat customers and hoping the word will not get out that is only partly works and you’ll get no real support. For the most part they are right it seems… most of you bought the product, get crappy to no support but still keep coming back. I’ve seen some say “its the best on the market”… everyone has the right to their own opinion but ‘best’ in my ind would mean it had great support & customer service OR it worked perfectly - from what I’ve seen on the forum, neither are even close to being true.
Companies like MCV will never gain real market share unless another company OEMs the product, takes customer feedback to make improvements, and layers good customer service on top.
It is obvious MCV does not care about their customers - they don’t read (or respond) any forum posts.[/quote]
Huh, odd… That explains the crappy directions, but you would think it would at least work correctly.
This is the primary reason I REFUSE to upgrade to UI5. I do agree, those of us who are dealers, developers, and testers should have gotten a Vera 3 and a Vera 2 with UI5 MONTHS ago.
I have been in the technology industry for over 25 years and have never seen a product being pushed out with problems galore and having no software (plugins) that work correctly.
MCV is going to be in a world of hurt when the current developers get frustrated and go else where and won’t code anymore for Vera.
I’m at the point now, getting a ZWave USB controller and use my Linux Server to do my home automation with a lot more customization and a lot more stable!
I'm at the point now, getting a ZWave USB controller and use my Linux Server to do my home automation with a lot more customization and a lot more stable!
If no sensible API to handle Z-wave comms. programmatically comes along fairly soon I might end up doing the same as you.