My Feedback after a week of use

[Alfonso Presa 6]

TLDR; Very very very disappointed. Looks like this project is abandoned and loosing functionality month by month. I'm seriously considering returning my HC2. I'm going also to sum it up for the owners, directors, investors behind Fibaro's enterprise, CTO: I think something very bad is happening in your company, you should be reviewing your technical debt, stabilizing your processes and looking at user feedback and reported issues ASAP. Don't take any steps forward (like making a new Mobile app for example) without solving this.

 

Intro

I recently acquired an HC2 looking for a more stable alternative to my previous controller, that was an RPI with a ZWave.ME card attached running raspbian with Domoticz. I've plenty of devices from different manufacturers: Switches from Fibaro and Philio (for controlling my 21 shutters vía 4 groups with 8 hardware relays, and my police connected alarm system), some Fibaro universal sensors (for the flood detectors already present in my house, and Alarm integration),  Fibaro flood sensors, Fibaro motion sensors, Vision ZG8101 Garage door detector, ... Along with that in terms of Zwave I 've Philips hue for the lights, Tado controller for the Air Conditioner and Heat Pump Controller and Google Home Mini for voice controlling.

 

The starts

I connected my current controller to the HC2 and delegated the primary role. The devices were detected but as "not configured", so I launched the reconfiguration. Some devices were correctly detected, some were not, which is something I more or less understand, so I start manually removing and adding the devices. It took me quite a lot of time but I finally got them almost "paired" but the Vision Garage detector which it still rejects.

 

The configuration

I found a lot of problems getting the system working close to what I was working with Domoticz but I got very disappointed with the following:

 

1. You cannot make virtual devices display as real devices! So I cannot make a Shutter that actually looks like a shutter in the mobile UI. Yes you can add icons and get the buttons, but you will always have it appearing inside the "virtual devices" section which says nothing from the user perspective and that doesn't help in terms of organization. I understand that with virtual devices you can implement almost anything, but you should be able to select kind of a "contract" or a "pattern" that could force you the buttons to implement to match the real devices ones. The rest of the functionality should rely on abstractions allowing virtual or physical implementations.

 

2. You cannot create your own plugins! Looking at the forums looks like some time ago that was possible, but it was suddenly removed..... Why?!!! It would make a lot of sense to create your own plugins.... ok virtual devices functionality is there... but you cannot make devices that looks like physical so for me they are very limited. Also there are very little plugins available, almost all are for cameras.  No plugins for Tado and no way I can develop one. I can develop a VD, but I never would be able to make the room temperature of Tado display as the room temperature in Fibaro.

 

3. LUA editing interface.... Come on guys... there are tons of OpenSource WYSIWYG editors for that, allowing nested if else conditions and much more....

 

4. LUA language. Documentation is almost useless, specially with the usage of non-standard methods like FHttp and such... Can't you set the timeout for an FHttp, come on! Why do you need a different language API for Virtual Devices?

 

5. It's a pain to connect third party services for notifications like telegram. It makes something that is extremely easy (make a GET/POST request to a given endpoint) extremely hard (define a variable that through the UI only accepts numbers but it does accept texts when value is provided in LUA, create a LUA scene relying on that variable, ...) 

 

6. HUE lights doesn't work properly (for me it success to turn on or off 50% of time, and gives failures the other 50%) and doesn't display as targets of scenes.... forcing to implement them in LUA. It would have been very easy not to fail on this if some of the abstraction explained in point 1 was implemented.

 

7. Cannot set location of the house because the free maps API is being used and it has now been deprecated.... Not words for this given we are talking about a piece of hardware+software that cost several hundreds of dollars.

 

8. Weather doesn't update.... from none of its two sources, and it looks like this has been like that for more than a month according to the forums. Where I work, an user facing problem with this level of criticality (given the weather is in a very relevant place in the UI) should be resolved in an SLA of hours. Having it unresolved for the amount of time that it has being (~month and counting) says a lot about the level of quality of the software and processes that are working behind the scenes.

 

9. Installers app only available for certified partners.... Why is that? Why do you assume DIY users like me don't deserve that application?

 

10.  Family tracking seems to have vanished. I see in the forum a lot of captures, looks like scenes provide that "user arriving to a point" functionality, the mobile application states about the precision of the geolocation, but there's no way to access that information, the API says "hasGPS: false", and scenes do not trigger at all.

 

11. IFTTT integration kind of works, but looks like scenes activate when their "triggering conditions" change and not when their conditions are matched.... so it's kind of useless.

 

12. Google home integration is easy to configure, but not all scenes appear.... why?

 

... There are a bunch more things that I though of writing but I don't remember.

 

@FIBARO Feel free to contact me for more details about this comments even if they imply gathering logs or similar or trying "beta" versions. I took the time to write this feedback because I sincerely want this piece of software+hardware to work as it should.

 

I would also like to ask a question and I expect a sincere and transparent answer from your side, are you changing to a strategy targeted at partner installers? If so, please tell us "the DIY users".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 19, 2019 by Alfonso Presa

[kroeatschge 29]

hello @Alfonso Presa,

thank you for this detailed report!

 

I want to point out that this is a user forum. Fibaro has stated that many times in here.

Fibaro does offically not do any support in here.

I want to ask you to send your concerns to [email protected].

Only there you will have direct contact to fibaro.

 

It might happen that some fibaro employee is reading it in here, but you can't expect it.

 

BR - kro

[Soft 17]

@kroeatschge I do agree with you that this is a user forum, but we know that this forum is monitored by Fibaro.
And I think that @Alfonso Presa got most of his views spot on in respect to what many of us think.
@Alfonso Presa Thank you for writing in lettes what at least I'm thinking.

[Alfonso Presa 6]

@kroeatschge Thank you for your answer. This was not intended as a support request but as an open way to give my opinion of what I have seen so far while using to feedback. Bot in order to see if others share my vision, and so that future users can also take the best, well informed, decisions when investing in a controller. I will indeed report some of the issues (like the error while trying to add the Vision sensor so the network) via customer support service so that I can get more focused aid. Even though there are some things in which I don't expect any support (plugins development capabilities disappearing, LUA development difficulties and inconsistencies, clearly wrong "by design" decisions like the Virtual Devices not acting like real ones) and some that I just want to say because it gives a "bad smell" of where this whole product is leading to. So this may be a place to start a discussion about what other users think and hopefully for @FIBARO to prove wrong :-).

 

@Soft Thanks! I think you got my point :-).

 

 

[Alfonso Presa 6]

Today after waking up, my Google Home got a little bit stucked when triggering the "disarm" scene for my alarm. I didn't get my telegram notification stating "alarm disarmed".... The Fibaro Mobile app claimed that my user credentials were wrong. When I attempted to  get into the Fibaro UI through browser I got a 503 error and a button to restart services. I clicked that button, and waited for almost 10 minutes.... Still locked. I ended manually disarming the alarm and awakening my childs due to the noise.

 

Sorry but I've already lost automation functionality and one of my devices.... Also loosing stability is something that I cannot afford. I've just asked for a money back return from my seller and going to drop off this community. I'm really disappointed because getting a Fibaro controller was something I've been looking forward since I started in this home automation world 3 years ago. For me it was like the cenit of home controllers.... I wish you all the luck. I would like to see me buying a Fibaro controller in a couple of years with the same level of hope I had 1 week ago when I bought this one.