First impressions of the Fibaro System

[topolino 0]

I just received my Home Center 2 (HC2) and some Fibaro devices about a week ago. I am sharing my first impressions as a new home automation enthusiast and as a User Experience professional. I hope it can be of some value for other users and for Fibaro’s development team.

Ahead of competition

First of all, marketing, packaging, product design and ease of use really stands out against the competition in this market. That being said, the competitors are living in the stone ages. Fibaro deserve a lot of credit for really trying to lift this market to a new dimension, and I think they are posed to successfully fill a niche with great potential. The only problem right now is that only the most basic units work right out of the box, and getting the house up and running still requires a lot of scenes, coding and headscratching.

Comparisions

I tried out a Tellstick Net, a Z-Stick with Indigo and a VeraLite before getting the HC2, so I can testify that connecting devices and starting to use the system is far easier with HC2 than with any of the others, where this part of the process was quite painful and frustrating since devices have to be very close to the device for connection. The UI of the other systems was far behind Fibaro’s in graphical quality, but sometimes more efficient once you get to know it despite being a little less intuitive.

Disappointments

The biggest disappointment with Fibaro was the huge gap between advertised functionality and actual functionality in the Smoke Sensor and the Humidity Sensor. I have since realized that this is supposed to be fixed in version 4 of the software, but that was only mentioned by users in the forums, and nowhere in Fibaro’s marketing or user manuals. I’ll never get back the many hours I wasted trying to get this to work by connecting, disconnecting, removing batteries and searching for errors.

One discovery in particular almost had me return the system altogether and give up on Fibaro alltogether was when I tested the Smoke Sensor in our fireplace. Heavy smoke from a burning log was flowing all over the sensor, and the only warning I got was a push notification on my phone because I had set that up previously. I doubt that would have prevented my two kids and wife from burning to death if I were out traveling. Compare this to this statement in the small user manual:

"Extremely easy installation - simply install it in location prone to fire”

Not so. The sensor didn’t beep at all. To verify this, I performed the same test with a second unit straight from the box. I just cannot understand how it is possible to ship a product like this without a clear warning that you need a regular smoke alarm next to it to sleep safely at night.

I’m very curious to hear Fibaro’s response to this!

Home Center 2

The controller is well built and the UI is relatively easy to use. Adding devices is elegant and mostly very easy. There’s a learning curve to get to understand how to use the different panels, scenes and settings, and to understand the dependencies between them. There’s a way to go before this product is ready for mainstream, but I believe Fibaro will get there.

The lates software update took quite a while before it showed up, so I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out things that were already solved in the update.

Mobile Phones

Mobiles get polled with customizable intervals. I think this could have been solved better by comparing the discovered position to the distance to home. If I’m close to the house, poll me at the minimum interval, but if I’m far from home, poll me at larger interval – maybe at half the calculated time it would take me to get home? This would save battery on the phone.

iPhone and iPad apps

The UI of the iOS apps is quite fancy, but a little dated compared to the current trend of more flat and clear design. I don’t think Fibaro have to quit its trademark use of heavy graphics, but losing bevels and gradients and make actual information stand out better from pure illustrations would help a lot.

The apps are unfortunately designed around room setup rather than task and usage scenarios. This makes the user spend too much time drill down in the user interface to find things in each room instead of finding current status on the front page and directly manipulate most used items in customizable screens.

The greatest benefit that z-wave offers over cheaper alternatives is two way communication so that you can be sure what state each device is actually in, and to keep the server in sync with devices that are controlled from different sources. This state seems to be instantly synced to the iOS apps, but the problem is that it’s very hard to see what that state actually is because the difference between on- and off- representations of the devices are so small that they are hardly distinguishable. Take a look at the attached image showing the difference between ON and OFF states.

API

Because the iOS apps are slow hard to use for simple tasks they are not something I can possibly get my wife to start using. So I was happy to find that there is an API. I was not so happy when I found that there’s still no documentation in English despite promises of translation since 2012.

I have one big question about the API that I haven’t found: Does it provide a way to get notified about state changes by push via a websocket or some similar mechanism? Without this, I’m afraid any app users generate with the API will lose the major benefit of Z-Wave. Polling is not an option.

Conclusion

All in all, considering price and competition, I still think Fibaro is a good choice. And anyone considering the system should look out for version 4.

I am very close to returning the three smoke sensors that I have bought and get some Nest sensors instead. But I’ll wait to hear what Fibaro has to say about this first.

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[Johan71 0]

Good review.

[Dalle1985 16]

Your smoke detectors aren't beeping? Thats a bit strange... I have 5 and all respond to light smoke (smoldering piece of paper towel) with audible beeping. I have however set mine up to flash the bedlights five times to wake you up and then at the same time turn on all the lights in the house to make it easier to find your way out. Furthermore I have ordered an alarm siren which will be programmed to also activate in case of fire.

I am however working on something a bit more sophisticated. I want to use a raspberry pi to create a personalized vocalization system which can give you different warnings for different scenarios (i.e. Function as a door bell, but at the same time have an alarm siren, a fire alarm siren and be able to give you voice feedback - i.e. Tell me that my girlfriend has forgotten to turn off her flattening iron again).

As for the API, you'll need an external script to monitor the json values of the API for changes and then pass forward the notification you want. Have a look at the project I have ongoing. It's my own personalized controller interface based on android tablets. The functionality of these are much greater than any z-wave switch on the market, but at the same time, the tablets can be bought for less than the price of a single wireless switch.

But welcome onboard! Unfortunately, there are some shortcomings, but with a bit of lateral thinking, you can do almost anything with the HC2 - when it comes to home automation anyway.

[topolino 0]

Thank you for you answer, and big thanks for sharing the code of your project! That's really valuable for the community.

I have downloaded it, but I haven't spent too much time on it yet. By a first glance, I think I'll find your code more useful than the sparse documentation (Google translate works quite well translating it from polish, but only until the first code snippet. The rest of the text remains in polish). I hope to contribute to further use of the API later on. My first thought was to wrap the functionality in a PHP class for easier use throughout the code, but right now, I'm considering making a javascript or Cocoa version instead. I'll have to look more into it before I decide.

It sounds like a waste that you have to resort to polling by proxy to achieve push for this basic functionality, but we can hope that this will be sorted out by the system in a later release. It's a little strange since the iOS apps already have this functionality, so I guess there must be another way somehow.

The two Fibaro smoke sensors remained silent even after about a minute of heavy smoke. A cheap supermarket smoke alarm sounded almost immediately under the same conditions. It sounds like mine are defective and must be returned to the reseller.

Have you found a way to differentiate between tamper alarm and smoke alarm in the system? As it is now, my humidity sensor sends leakage alarm when I pick it up.

And I have also discovered that the tamper alarm of the smoke sensor is not working. The small tap is supposed to be depressed by an even smaller tap on the fastening bracket, but that just isn't happening. This must be an obvious design flaw.

[Dalle1985 16]

There must be something all wrong with those smoke detectors. My tamperalarm functions flawlessly - but it does just give the same alarm in fibaro as smoke alarm activation.

Some sort of library for all the functions would be really good, I just haven't bothered with it yet. If you've looked through the code, you'll see that it is very "low tech" and quite messy as I've just built it as I've gone along. I will be rewriting it to be more smooth later on, but until there is a proper API-documentation, I won't be bothered. The interaction is quite simple right now - but are you sure that the ios app isn't just using the same curl out, json in philosophy? If it is using some form of direct interface with the controller, it should be possible to sniff out the packets being sent between the app and the hc2 and reverse engineer it into a useable library... But this should ofcourse come from fibaro instead of working around it by reverse engineering.

[topolino 0]

I suppose you're right that something is wrong with my smoke detectors. I think this is something that Fibaro should take quite seriously. It's like selling a life saving bouy that doesn't float.

I sniffed a little on the iPhone app, and it seems to be using the same API that you're using. I don't know the API well enough to tell if this feature is documented or not.

The url is /api/mobile/interface/refreshStates?last=XXX

or /api/refreshStates?last=XXX which seems to do the same

"last" is a number returned by the previous call to the same command, and it is used to give you only the updates that has happened since the previous call.

I suspect that this is not push, but that refreshStates is called repeatedly to receive refreshed states since last check.

Does anyone here know? And how often should this command be called to keep the UI in sync without bothering the HC2 too much?

[Brick 13]

I suppose you're right that something is wrong with my smoke detectors. I think this is something that Fibaro should take quite seriously. It's like selling a life saving bouy that doesn't float.

I experienced also some problems with my flood sensors at the beginning and was close to give them back but I finally find out that the problems were due to a wrong HC2 inclusion, not in the devices themselves. I had to remove and re-add them several times before getting all the green messages and the devices properly configured.

A good test to find this out is to use the included range tester feature. Does it work in your smoke sensors?

[HorseOne 1]

The url is /api/mobile/interface/refreshStates?last=XXX

or /api/refreshStates?last=XXX which seems to do the same

"last" is a number returned by the previous call to the same command, and it is used to give you only the updates that has happened since the previous call.

I suspect that this is not push, but that refreshStates is called repeatedly to receive refreshed states since last check.

Does anyone here know? And how often should this command be called to keep the UI in sync without bothering the HC2 too much?

I use this in an iRidium (

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) test application and poll the HC2 every 500ms without any issue.

Since this is a single request, it doesn't add heavy traffic on the network, and only change-of-states are returned from HC2.

[topolino 0]

Cool, thanks. I suppose that will do as an acceptable alternative to push.