Really quite impressed - HC Lite First Impressions - Updated

[TimJWatts 4]

OK - I have come to the HC-Lite from a Vera Lite which I returned because it was unstable, immature and generally bloody awful.

I'm actually quite impressed with the HC-L

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It seems "finished".

I know there are forums posts that say the opposite, but my initial impressions are:

1) Fast web interface (Vera Lite is damn slow)

2) The networking is done "sensibly". It DHCPs as expected and there's no silly bouncing off a "portal" for random operations. It is 100% local. For the remote helper, this seems to be a simple reverse tunnel that takes you direct to the local device's web. It's the way I would have done it.

3) I only have 2 devices: TKB TZ88E 13A UK power switch+energy monitor. Had to do a ZWave reconfig to get the energy monitor to work, but now it does it seems pretty good. Nice energy graphs immediately unlike the Vera.

4) The Aeon Multisensor was a nightmare to include. Had to hook it up to USB power and poke the button a few times to get it to find all the sub sensors (light, humidity, temperature).

Now I've stuck it outside it remains to be seen how well it works (or not).

5) Although I miss LUA, it seems reasonable that this device which is half the price of the HC2 has some limitations.

The scene programming is quite adequate and seems to "do it right" within limitations.

I DO wish there was a copy and paste option to duplicate notifications, scenes etc to make setting up second and 3rd items easier.

6) The REST/JSON API is simple and clean. I have easily have a "proper" server poll interesting values from this. That should open up possibilities.

Overall - pretty happy. Well done.

I'd rather have less features that all work, than millions of half assed broken features.

[akatar 208]

yes the lite is a pretty small device.

i had one for a couple of days and i must say impressive

and what i have heart there are expension packs.\

battery pack and 3g (as far as i know)

[TimJWatts 4]

OK - I've got some more TZ88s and one more Aeon Multisensor for the attic space (have the other outside).

I must say, after a few days, I am really quite impressed with the HCL.

I think Fibaro have got it mostly right - it is (fingers crossed) pretty damn stable and predictable. I am not getting devices going bye-bye (though I have turned off dead node detection as that seems to cause more trouble than it's worth).

I have a simple schedule turning on 4 heaters, with different times depending on which day (big OR-logic jobbie) and it respects a global "On Holiday" variable so I can set this as a flag for "no heating" or "minimal heating" if I maybe use another schedule for winter.

All I would say is if the features I mentioned could get worked into the HCL it would be nice - variable interpolation in messages in particular. It is rather silly having 8 notifications to email me when 4 heaters either go on or go off (I like the double check at this stage).

But it's way better than anything else I've tried *in its class*. It is supposed to be "simple, just works" and I think it's pretty close.

[ Added: 2014-11-27, 00:05 ]

Oh - and I forgot to say - the energy graphing is the dogs bollocks

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Really very sweet... Far better than I expected from this class of device.

Can we have other graphs - like temperature, light and humidity?

[j.nowacki 5]

TimJWatts, so far we added temperature graphs in beta, it will be available on HCL also. More graphs will follow

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[TimJWatts 4]

Cool... Wish you could hint when the next firmware will be out for the HCL but I expect you cannot

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Oh - one other thing... It would be better to ship a universal PSU rather than a shucko 2 pin - eg like:

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(I realise that is a 2.1mm plug and yours is a 2.5mm - but there should be something similar).

Or ship it with no PSU and let the vendor bundle a local one in.