I’m looking for information about the differences between various manufacturers’ lighting control devices. I want to buy more, but with the huge differences in price between one and another, I assume there must be differences in quality or functionality as well. Vendor sites say nothing helpful at all. Even the manufacturer web sites have very little useful info. Can anybody point me to some information?
Have you looked at the wiki? http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Supported_Hardware
This table is lacking the specific features of each device. This is a general problem in Zwave. I think it stems from one product being afraid it cannot do what another is doing.
Cooper,leviton,Act are the most feature rich. They can create associations and change dim rates …
Ge jasco does not support associations as far as I know. Associations are great to create virtual 3 way switching. Much faster than having vera do it.
Yes, I should have prefaced my comments by saying that, while I’m glad the “Supported Hardware” page exists on the wiki, I am finding it very UN-helpful as I try to decide between competing products. There’s no way to differentiate and there’s certainly no telling what kind of week-long Luup-scripting nightmare someone experienced before posting simply “it works” on the wiki.
Thanks for the info about GE not supporting associations. I almost ordered some of those this morning. And then the dim rates thing, yikes! Some devices might support it, but there’s always the “secret number” you have to fill in on that “secret field” deep in Vera’s innards. And little to no documentation to help!
God, this is fun!
the manufacturers instructions should tell you what types of features they support. You may have to look into the controller information for that manufacture.
ACT lists on their site.
To understand the difference in price between manufacturers and products you can look at it like this HP/Compaq have their consumer line(Pavilion) and their business line - IBM had their e-machines and their IntelliStations’ - each are computers or lines of computers what’s the difference in price?
In lighting here are the major players as of today:
Cooper/Aspire - Professional / Commercial
Leviton - Professional / Commercial
ACT - Commercial
GE/Jasco Commercial / Consumer
Intermatic - Homesetting (Consumer) Intouch - Professional / Commercial
Wayne Dalton WD - Consumer
I am running at least one device from every manufacturer listed - remember again another to put it - what’s the difference between a cadilliac and a yugo? Hope that helps 8)
I now have about 40 modules including two Wayne Dalton thermostats. I have been running them using the GE advanced remotes. I tried the home remote Pro Gateway, but I had a lot of problems with that. Now, I’m trying to use vera. Has anyone had any success using the GE advanced remotes with Vera.I would like to use a GE remote as primary and Vera as secondary. I haven’t tried that yet. Any ideas? I would appreciate any ideas that would save me from wasted legwork. I have Parkinson’s and scurrying from room to room is difficult.
I tried out vera on several of my modules and it seemed to work well. Someone mentioned voice recognition. I have used Dragon NaturallySpeaking to control their to some extent. The main problem is that the screens at findvera.com have the double vertical scrollbars. You would be much easier if you could just go into any different screen. My thought is that when you go into findvera.com the first screen should have a menu for rooms, a menu for scenes, a menu for events etc.
Advanced remote works great. don’t use as primary. Vera work in the Zensys SUC?SIS mode. This allows remotes like the Advanced from Ge/jasco to work as inclusionary remotes while allowing Vera as primary.
This is a great feature as you can add new devices with either the remote or with Vera.
The myth that you can have only one primary is only partially true. Suc/sis has been around for years yet developers are reluctant to implement.
In fact we may see it go away because Developers have not built proper hardware to implement Suc/SIS and the Security class in the same Primary controller. So in Zensys’ infinite wisdom is caving to the cheap manufactures and not making it a mandatory feature anymore( possibly)
How do you use the GE remote as an inclusionary remote. I’ve found a couple of hits in the wiki for inclusionary controller, but not enough for me to understand how to do it. Ditto for SUC/sys.