Home Center 2 - First Impressions

[EliteAV 12]

FAO: Moderators - I wasnt sure whether I could post this to the HC2 forum as I have included references to other home automation systems but this is just for context rather than as a direct competitor comparison.

 

Introduction

 

Hi everyone, this is my very first post and I wanted to provide some feedback after using the Fibaro Home Center 2 (& Home Center 2 Lite) after a few days, having migrated from Smartthings.

 

 

System

1 x Fibaro Home Center 2 running 4.520 (for House)

1 x Fibaro Home Center Lite running 4.520 (for Garden Office)

2 x Fibaro RGBW Controller (for kitchen lighting)

1 x Fibaro Double Relay Switch (for front garden lighting)

1 x Fibaro Motion Sensor (for hallway)

8 x Fibaro Door/Window Sensor 2

2 x Philips Hue Go lights

2 x Swiid Cord Switch

8 x Switches (Mix of TBK, Popp, Everspring, Aeotec)

2 x Nest Protect smoke alarms

2 x Daikin Emura II aircon + 2 x BRP069A41 Wi-Fi adapter

1 x Daikin Nexura aircon + BRP069A41 Wi-Fi adapter

2 x Amazon Echo Show 2^nd generation, 1 x Echo Dot, 1 x Echo Spot

1 x Synology RT2600ac router / CAT5 wired ethernet.

 

 

Background

 

I have been playing around with home automation systems for about 15 years starting with some PC based systems (which were very unreliable) then settling on MIOS / Micasaverde Vera systems (various) for quite a few years before moving to Smartthings in Dec 2017 and then finally this week (Nov 2018) to Fibaro Home Center 2/Lite.

 

I moved from Vera to Smartthings because although Vera was functionally fairly rich thanks to a very active developer community, the product itself left something to be desired from a look and feel perspective both in terms of the Vera UI7 web interface and mobile app.  Smartthings by contrast is designed primarily to be managed / controlled from a mobile app (so was a huge improvement on the Vera equivalent) whilst also providing a web-based IDE for power users. 

 

Anyway, long story short, I found the cloud based Smartthings model a little frustrating in terms of reliability and outages.  I was also unable to switch from their “classic” mobile app to a newer version as it would not support devices with custom device handlers (equivalent to Fibaro plugin/virtual devices).

 

So, this prompted me to come up with a list of criteria that I was looking for in a replacement system:

 

·       Local rather than cloud-based processing.

·       Web-based UI for management.

·       Responsive/Intuitive mobile app (Android)

·       Full Z-Wave feature set support.

·       Intuitive / Powerful scripting language.

·       Ability to create custom device handlers.

·       Good support for 3^rd party devices.

·       Good developer support.

 

A few of the systems I considered were:

 

·       Fibaro Home Center 2 (HC2)

·       Athom Homey

·       Zipato Zipabox / Zipatile

 

 

Ultimately no single system satisfied all of the criteria but what swung it for Fibaro was their very good range of Z-Wave devices and the fact that on some of the new Gen 5 Z-Wave devices these would by OTA (Over the Air) firmware upgradeable from the HC2.

 

Although this is my first post here, I have been reading the forum for a number of years and held off purchasing HC2 due to some of the issues that were being reported in the forum following new firmware releases and particularly bricked units having to be shipped back to Poland. However, it looks like Fibaro have made some big improvements here with backup / recovery options.  So, in no particular order are my impressions of the Fibaro HC2 system based on my first few days of use.

 

 

User Interface

 

I am personally not a big fan of skeuomorphic interfaces – I think they can look good in marketing material and logically they should be more intuitive for end users as the controls mimic real world controls / devices. However, the flatter / simpler UI design principles now adopted by Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are what most people are familiar with so by contrast the HC2 UI now looks a little dated.

 

So, the first thing I did was replace all of the room and device icons with alternatives thanks to some good work by a chap called Andreas Vichr (just google for Fibaro flat icons).  I think the simple white on black with occasional yellow highlight design works well with the black Fibaro UI (& I was pleased to see that all of the custom icons I added were picked up in the mobile app).

 

Device Support

 

Z-Wave

 

Because Smartthings appears to have made a conscious decision not to emphasise the protocol that underpins their platform (i.e. Z-Wave and Zigbee), they don’t support all of the features available using each protocol. A key feature that is missing is Z-Wave Controller Shift / Migration.  This meant that I had to manually exclude all of my devices and delete scenes and then include under the HC2.

 

One pleasant surprise, given the issues I had with distance inclusion when originally setting up the  Smartthings hub, was that the HC2 was able to include 95% of my Z-Wave devices on the first attempt with the HC2 being located in a first-floor study and all of the powered / battery devices being located some distance away in other ground/first floor rooms.  The 5% of Z-Wave devices that I couldn’t include from a distance were 2 x Fibaro Door/Window sensors in parts of the house that had been extended (with steel RSJ/beams probably interfering with signal transmission) and a Fibaro Dual Relay in the attached garage (however I had learnt from previous experience that this has a short inclusion range).

 

After including all of my Z-Wave devices to the HC2 and naming and assigning to rooms, I was puzzled by a fairly large number of hidden devices in the unassigned room that I assumed to be “ghost” or invalid devices. I tried to force delete these and noticed two things – firstly only some of the devices were actually removed and secondly I then realised that I had removed all of my battery powered Fibaro Door/Window sensors!.   After further investigation I realised that the devices that I had assumed to be ghost devices were in fact master or associated slave devices, so I named them accordingly and assigned to the relevant rooms (whilst keeping them hidden) and hard reset & reincluded the Door/Window sensors.

 

Other

 

The easy part completed, I then wanted to integrate my Philips Hue Go lights with their associated bridge and this is where I encountered my first stumbling block.  I found the Philips Hue plugin easily enough in the Fibaro Marketplace and initially struggled a little to get it to connect to the bridge (I think this was just a plugin UI issue as it had actually connected and discovered the 2 lights) but then was unable to include the Hue lights in any scenes.  A quick google provided the answer – only devices or virtual devices can be used in scenes.  This did make me wonder what the purpose/value of a plugin is if all you can do is manually turn devices on/off!  Anyway, this led me to the Philips Hue AOI VD and SA Philips Hue Preview VD by Zoran Sankovic.  I used to be a developer so can recognise good quality code and documentation when I see it and Zoran has done a very impressive job here.

 

I haven’t yet created complex scenes using the Hue lights beyond simple schedules but will be doing so using the Hue AOI VD to replicate a set of sunrise scenes that I had running under Smartthings. I should also mention that I am using Zoran’s Weather State VD as the built in yrWeather plugin initially failed to display any weather for my location (Southend-on-Sea, GB) but oddly started doing so after the Weather State VD was installed and running.

 

One thing I observed from installing Virtual Devices is that the icon management under HC2 is flawed – manually loading and then identifying dozens of icons required by a device and then updating the code with the correct image IDs is crazy.  I am sure this issue has been discussed endlessly but personally I think that Fibaro should look to borrow some of the ideas from Microsoft .NET manifests whereby an application (or device in this case) has its own copies of all required artefacts so can reference them by name without code changes.

 

Nest Protect. I was very surprised that no plugin / Virtual Device was available for Nest given that practically every home automation system on the market supports their devices (although for Smartthings this was initially thanks to a 3^rd party developer but I understand that Nest is supported officially now).   I realise that there are too many new devices coming to market now for home automation vendors to be able to support them all (personally I think this is a clear sign that smart homes are moving out of niche territory) but I do think that the market leading devices in each category should really be supported out of the box.

 

Daikin air-conditioning. Daikin have been selling Wi-Fi adapters that plug into many of their models of split systems for a number of years now which enables control from mobile devices.  There are a number of different adapters such as BRP069A41, BRP069A42, BRP069A43, BRP069A45 etc but I believe they share the same basic REST API which whilst never officially documented, is now documented for the majority of features.  I was not expecting this to be supported by Fibaro but plan on creating a virtual device for this to allow me to use the Fibaro scheduler (taking advantage of geolocation presence detection) rather than the Daikin scheduler.

 

 

Alexa Integration

 

I removed the Smartthings skill and all controlled devices.

 

I then installed the standard Fibaro skill here because I only required basic on/off commands and have always found the “Alexa, ask <device> to <do something>” approach less intuitive than “Alexa, turn of the kitchen lighting”.   Anyway, after adding the skill, linking the Amazon and Fibaro accounts and asking Alex to discover devices and getting a “no devices found” message I realised that a key step was missing.  I needed to register my HC2 with the Fibaro ID cloud (I am surprised that this doesn’t happen automatically as part of the HC2 configuration wizard). Once I had done this, all of my HC2 devices were discovered and everything was good, or at least I thought it was…

 

Only a couple of lights were discovered and a lot of switches – of course this made sense when I realised that is exactly what I have: a lot of switches/sockets with table/desk lamps plugged into them. So, I changed them in the Alexa app to lights and whilst doing that, changed the HC2 “Controlled Device” setting to “Lighting” for each of the switches/sockets.   The 2^nd problem I encountered which took a lot more time to solve was the missing device issue – specifically one of the Swiid Cord Switches which is one of two that I have for a pair of table lamps in my hallway.  I tried all of the usual things in HC2 to remedy this, from renaming the device to soft configure but nothing worked.

 

However, when comparing the device settings for the 2 x Swiid Cord switches in HC2, I noticed that the device that was missing in Alexa was showing a different Producer (CBBC I think) in HC2 compared to Swiid for the device that was visible in Alexa.  Interestingly the Swiid Cord switch that was causing issues with Alexa took multiple attempts to Z-Wave include at a distance under HC2 even though the other Swiid Cord switch (for the other lamp) that included without issues was only 6 feet away from the other Swiid Cord switch. Anyway, this suggested to me that the reason one of the Cord switches could not be seen in Alexa may have been caused by an incomplete/invalid device classification provided by HC2.  So, I relocated the Cord switch close to the HC2 to perform a Z-Wave exclude and include and noticed this time that the HC2 device Producer details were now showing as Swiid and performed a device discovery again in Alexa which worked and the device was found.  I had a very similar issue with a Popp Z-Wave switch that I added to HC2 today for a 2^nd lamp in a bedroom. No issues with the device inclusion and control but it was invisible to Alexa after a device discovery.  Despite multiple exclusion/inclusions Alexa would never see the device so working on the assumption that it did not like the device classification provided by HC2, I replaced it with a TBK Z-wave switch and this was found by Alexa.

 

 

Security

 

If I am honest, this is the area that I have struggled with the most with HC2.

 

All of the Fibaro Door/Window sensors and Motion sensor work under HC2 without issues i.e. they detect and report open/close or motion events reliably and quickly despite being located at the perimeters of my house.  I like the dedicated Alarm panel which provides a comprehensive and colour coded event history (this is more complete than the equivalent functionality in Smartthings).  I also tested arming and tripping all devices to see how this was reported by the mobile app (you get a bleeping alert sound with details on which devices have been tripped/breached and can disarm one of more devices, although I was baffled how you arm/disarm the alarm from the app until I realised that you can swipe up/down on the alarm icon in the app to do this).

 

It was alarm scenes that left me completely confused.

 

Under my Smartthings setup, when an alarm was triggered by any of the included sensors, I had this switch on one of my Philips Hue Go lamps and set it to red.  As per my comments about Philips Hue integration earlier, I decided to try to replicate this with Fibaro devices – specifically the 2 x RGBW Controllers that I have in my kitchen driving 2 sets of RGBW LED strips that run under all of the wall cabinets.

 

Magic Scenes appeared to be the answer to what I wanted as (a) There was a Special trigger type for Alarms and (b) Predefined actions are available for RGB (but unfortunately not RGBW) lights.

 

However, I couldn’t get this to work despite ticking the box to allow the scene to run when an alarm was triggered.  I tested the scene by manually running and it set the RGBW lights to red as expected but an alarm event would not trigger this automatically.

 

I then looked at the security actions available under the Advanced tab of the Alarm panel but whilst this appear to allow lights to be turned/off that appears to be the limit.

 

I then looked at some of the advanced alarm parameters on the RGBW controller itself but had no luck getting these to work (I wonder if they require some specific unsupported Z-Wave command classes for alarm events).

 

I know that some users have successfully implemented alarm actions based on a single sensor but that isn’t viable for me as I have a house full of sensors so just need to know when the global alarm state is active.  I am sure this is possible with LUA scripting but surely it should be possible to trigger scenes based on alarm states/events without having to write code?

 

 

Master/Remote Gateway

 

I have a garden office which is located approximately 30M from my house and I wanted the ability to control/monitor lighting and a door sensor.  Getting Z-Wave devices to work at a distance across a garden is a non-starter. However, I was able to achieve what I wanted a few years ago when I had one Vera system acting as a master and another in the garden office as a slave (Note: This should not be confused with Z-Wave Primary/Secondary controllers).   This was one of my key criteria for a new system this time around and my research indicated that the Fibaro HC2 would support this which is why I also purchased a Home Center Lite (HCL).

 

The good news is that I was able to add the HCL as a remote gateway to the HC2 and imported the room and device settings without any issue.  I just had to replace the stock icons with my custom icons and that was it.

 

 

Initial Thoughts

 

If you google Fibaro Home Center 2 reviews, one of the most comprehensive is by a site called Automatedhome but this dates back to 2012.  This shows that the HC2 has been around for a while and Fibaro are still supporting it and adding new capabilities (I mentioned the cloud and local backup briefly earlier and I know that this was an area that should probably have addressed earlier but I have to say, working in IT, that the way this has been implemented now looks very thorough – although of course the real test will be when I have to use it in an emergency!).  I know from browsing the Fibaro forums a couple of years ago that a lot of people were asking when is the HC3 going to be released but I suspect that the reason it hasn’t is because the hardware in the HC2 is more than good enough for its purpose.

 

I think Fibaro Home Center is aimed more at intermediate / advanced customers (although the top end of that market will obviously go for much more expensive installer only solutions). I don’t think it is well suited to beginners who are just starting to dabble in smart home control.  This is where I think Smartthings is a better fit. As a testament to this, I recommended Smartthings to a colleague of mine who wanted to setup a very basic monitoring solution for 1 x Fibaro Door/Window sensor to start with.  The following day he told me that he had everything up and running in about 15 minutes thanks to the easy to use Smartthings app.   However, for customers who don’t want cloud only solutions and have properties with a fairly large number of devices and want a way to integrate custom / non-officially supported devices, I think HC2 is a very good fit.

 

I will add more feedback as I think of it and I hope what I have provided so far is useful but what I would say now though is that I think HC2 could become an even better product if the following areas were addressed:

 

UI redesign

o   Lose the skeuomorphic aesthetic in favour of a flatter/cleaner design (Although performing a different function, the Synology DSM (Disk Station Manager) software for their NAS device range is a model of how to present complex/rich data using HTML5).

o   Make the UI more adaptive to different screen sizes so that higher resolution screens can show more content without large areas of empty space.

o   Fewer full page refreshes!

o   Auto save.

o   Remove duplicated navigation controls.

o   Streamline the mobile app – make this information rather than device led (in fact that could probably apply to the web app with a Whole House Health Status type view).

Unify plugin / Virtual Device model – fix the icons issue!

Better out of the box support for market leading 3^rd party devices

Improve/Fix(?) the Alarm functionality

Offer Zoran Sankovic a role as a consultant : - )

 

Current Setup

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Edited December 1, 2018 by EliteAV
Added screenshot of current setup

[alex88 71]

On 12/1/2018 at 6:50 PM, EliteAV said:

So, the first thing I did was replace all of the room and device icons with alternatives thanks to some good work by a chap called Andreas Vichr (just google for Fibaro flat icons). 

 

Nice tip. Thanks.

 

I created my own black and white icons many years ago as I agree with your sentiment, however the ones you have pointed out look better than mine!

[Igy 23]

Nice post. Im Fibaro user for more than 4 years. Until now I didn't find better solution. However, last week I think I did. Its not so nice in terms of UI, but area it rocks in is simplicity of setup, interoperable compatibility and easiness of creating all scenes and conditions for all kind of home automation. Im talking about Homey. I hate the way the UI looks, but Im amazed how nice is the system manageable. So far (after 3 days only) didn't find single use case that wouldn't be replicable from my previous Fibaro installation (70 devices, lighting, irrigation, heating, other appliance control, energy metering), beside IP camera support. Pretty fast responses when controlling over the google home, option to sent http get request to launch flows and also quite a big community. Lets see how it goes in few weeks, HC2 will wait in the shelf meanwhile

[lennminkhorst 1]

You perfectly summed up some of the things they should really focus on in the near future in order to both gain and maintain custommers in my opinion.

 

What I would like to add is that as a ex-programmer of web solutions and now installer, consultant and user of their system, they really need to bring back plugin development. 

I've read somewhere that they disabled it out of security concerns. But I honestly do feel like this really holds the platform back.

There are so many features or existing smart product with perfectly good API's that my custommers want to have intergrated but it is simply not possible being limited to virtual devices.

 

You also mentioned a redesign. I totally agree  and got a great suggestion:  Simply allow for custom CSS stylesheets (and perhaps HTML). That way people can make custom themes for the web interface and adding such a feature would require very llittle work on Fibaro's side whilst giving people like me the option to create themes and styles that fit my custommers wishes. Also, you could add theming support as a feature and perhaps make a marketplace section for it.

[Hedz 1]

Dear EliteAV, have you made any progress on the Daikin connection to the Fibaro. This is for me a key criteria to consider the HC2

 

[EliteAV 12]

Apologies that I have not responded to comments/feedback.

 

In the end, I found trying to develop & test scenes & virtual devices on HC2 just too frustrating - the tiny windows for displaying code in the UI are ridiculous.

 

So I decided to move to Hubitat although the process of excluding all of my Z-Wave devices from the HC2 and including on the Hubitat was not a quick process.

 

I think I prefer Groovy to Lua but one immediate advantage of the Hubitat is that that although it is does not provide a fully fledged IDE, you do at least get a full screen window for viewing and testing code.

 

I did successfully create a Bluetooth presence detector virtual device on the Hubitat using the same  Ingics iGS02e Bluetooth LAN Gateway that I use for the equivalent people monitor VD I created on the HC2, however I do still have a number of scenes and VDs running on the HC2 so am effectively just running 3 x gateways (Hubitat & HC2/HCL) in parallel with no communication between them.

 

The Bluetooth presence sensor uses low cost Bluetooth keyfobs rather than relying on a mobile phone.  The Bluetooth LAN Gateway can detect these up to about 20 metres.  Here is a screenshot of the Bluetooth presence VD I wrote:

 

Please login or register to see this image.

/monthly_2020_01/image.png.b1db42da906ce37f1ff1150eba694376.png" />

 

My main reason for posting again after all of this time is that I was able to create a Fibaro VD to control my Daikin Nexura (& Emura II) air conditioning systems which all have a Daikin BRP069A42 wifi adapter fitted.

 

There are quite a few variants of this wifi adapter so it is possible (likely) that my Daikin VD will work with them as well but I cannot guarantee that.

 

I have been using the Daikin VD in a scene to switch on the Daikin Nexura air conditioning system in my garden office in either heating or cooling mode; the scene uses a couple of other scenes / VDs I have written so that it only switches on the aircon when I am detected as being at home (using the Bluetooth presence VD I mentioned earlier and my Google calendar does not have any holidays listed (i.e. personal or Bank Holidays, i.e. I am working from home. I wont post that Google calendar integration scene here as it is someone else's code that I have hacked about and it really needs rewriting).

 

Anyway, here is a screenshot of the Daikin VD in action:

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

 

I have attached the exported VD and plain text files (for readability) showing the main code and button code. For the latter, I wanted to have a common UI function shared across all of the buttons that took different actions based on the button pressed. You cant really do that with the HC2 so I just created 1 piece of code that I use for every button and extract the button text to determine the action required.

 

I should point out that although I have a development background (Microsoft stack), I am still very much a newbie with Fibaro so some of the things I have done in code may not be as optimal as they could be.

 

However I have been using the Daikin VD every week for over a year and it has been very reliable with a very fast response time (I spent quite a bit if time tuning that).

 

Anyway I hope this is useful for some people.

 

My intention is to create a similar virtual device + application on Hubitat but have been a bit lazy just leaving this to run on my HC2.

 

I did see the announcement about the new HC3 and have been following the discussions about this, I definitely agree that Fibaro should provide some utilities to help developers migrate scenes/VDs, even if these cannot be fully migrated, something that highlights which sections of code will need to be updated, would be very useful. However I suspect that we will never see this and developers will be expected to start from scratch but lets see.

 

 

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Edited January 19, 2020 by EliteAV
Fixed incorrect references to Lua code running on HCL

[Sankotronic 2,370]

Hi @EliteAV ,

 

38 minutes ago, EliteAV said:

In the end, I found trying to develop & test scenes & virtual devices on HC2 just too frustrating - the tiny windows for displaying code in the UI are ridiculous.

 

Since I buy my HC2 5 years ago, first thing I did is look for the LUA IDE program and not because HC2 interface has small windows, but because as former IT developer it is somehow natural  for me to use dedicated programs to develop for anything and not only HC2. I think on many places here on forum many users recommended some LUA IDE programs like ZeroBrane Studio, BBEdit or some other programs that support LUA syntax and even debugging. I must say that I'm quite surprised that you as having some developing background (Microsoft Stack) didn't first look for LUA IDE program, but was trying to do things directly in those small code windows of HC2 interface.

 

BTW ZeroBrane Studio has some libraries that can be added so HC2 code can be tested in its environment even before is copied to HC2. I don't use them because I don't need them. I just write complete code and then test it on HC2 to clean some typos and eventually add more features

 

BTW2 I kind of like skeuomorphic aesthetic over that cold, not inventive flat solution which probably came out due to lack of imagination and greedy intention not to loose too much time in designing nice looking interfaces. Don't believe in everything what lazy, greedy or incapable people write on internet justifying flat interfaces. All my work on HA is about visual representation of current states more than just using some flat ugly cold icons. Lucky me Skeuomorphism is coming back as Neumorphism (Soft UI)

Please login or register to see this link.

    

 

Thank you for sharing Some of your code with Fibaro community. ? Only for that I give you one like!