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Home Center 3 is comming ?


fingusio

Question

Hello

 

I heard some news that new Home Center 3 comming in first quarter 2020.

 

Any other info someone have ?

Edited by fingusio
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I have asked Fibaro support when the Zigbee protocol be enabled.

See the screenshot for the answer?.


So for now the HC3 is not more than a HC2 in a different box and UI.

 

 

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11 minutes ago, kevin said:

I have asked Fibaro support when the Zigbee protocol be enabled.

See the screenshot for the answer?.


So for now the HC3 is not more than a HC2 in a different box and UI.

 

That is deeply disappointing and, given Fibaro's track record of broken promises on the HCL ( I bought 2 on the basis of the GSM and UPS options that were advertised), I am glad I did not pre-order one.

 

Fibaro seem to have no concern for the trade description laws and are advertising something well beyond what they are selling.

 

? Got me initially excited for nothing.

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5 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

That is deeply disappointing and, given Fibaro's track record of broken promises on the HCL ( I bought 2 on the basis of the GSM and UPS options that were advertised), I am glad I did not pre-order one.

Fibaro seem to have no concern for the trade description laws and are advertising something well beyond what they are selling.

 

Incorporating a zigbee chip does that mean that the HC3 aspire to be a zigbee Hub?

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28 minutes ago, jgab said:

 

Incorporating a zigbee chip does that mean that the HC3 aspire to be a zigbee Hub?

I’m kind of wondering because I’m not sure I would use that feature. I have a nice Hue app and 3rd party hue apps - difficult to compete with that ecosystem. Zigbee devices can only register with one controller (to my knowledge) and people even connect Ikea lights to their hue hubs these days....

I would like the fibaro team to become beta testers of Hue’s web-hook API so we could have an efficient integration without frequent polling of the Hue hub....

or even better - make web-hook client available in the device Lua api

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55 minutes ago, jgab said:

Incorporating a zigbee chip does that mean that the HC3 aspire to be a zigbee Hub?

 Fibaro stated specs for HC3:

 

  • Processor: Quad-core Arm Cortex A53 (1.2 GHz)
  • RAM: 2 GB
  • HDD: 8 GB
  • Power supply: 12V DC
  • Dimensions: 220x140x35 mm 
  • Z-Wave (500): 868.0-868.6 MHz 869.7-870.0 MHz
  • 433MHz (OOK, FSK, GFSK): 433.54-433.92 MHz
  • 868 MHz (OOK, FSK, GFSK): 868.3-868.94 MHz
  • ZigBee 2405-2480MHz
  • Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n/a/ac) 2400-2483MHz 5150-5350MHz
  • Bluetooth Low Energy 2402-2480MHz

I assume the mention of bluetooth and zigbee, neither mentioned in the manual, mean these are the features of the HC3 they are selling, not what they propose a year from now.

 

Is the purpose of adding the zigbee chip to add weight to the box or does it suggest connectivity to zigbee devices?

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1 hour ago, jgab said:

I’m kind of wondering because I’m not sure I would use that feature. I have a nice Hue app and 3rd party hue apps - difficult to compete with that ecosystem. Zigbee devices can only register with one controller (to my knowledge) and people even connect Ikea lights to their hue hubs these days....

I agree, but when you want to tap into the universe of Zigbee, the first thing to do is "get rid of proprietary controllers".

You clearly point out where Z-Wave has failed: nice lighting equipment. I mean luminaries, bulbs, remote controllers, about everything.

I have set up a test with quite a few Zigbee devices and open source, because HC3 does indeed ship with the controller on board but no software. ETA on HC3 to have some sort of Zigbee is Q4 2020. What is Zigbee? The more I read about it, the muddier it gets, it is not a "mesh" but a "mess" as a standard, or standards.

I highly recommend people to think about use cases of Zigbee devices, their price/performance ratio and compatibility...

I am not ready to post any conclusions yet, I may never be... But let me say "do not get too excited about Zigbee if you own a decent amount of Z-Wave stuff".

 

IMHO we can be sure of one thing in 2020: lot's of options, lot's of competing and incompatible stuff joined together by... Google? Amazon? Apple? Fibaro? Open Source?

 

On the one hand, these are fascinating times... Technology acronyms: Bluetooth (mesh ?), Zigbee (3.0? dotdot?), LORA, Thread, WiFi, 5G, errrrm maybe even Z-Wave...

 

I am not sure this makes life easier for "average Joe". But it is great for geeks like me.

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14 minutes ago, petergebruers said:

On the one hand, these are fascinating times... Technology acronyms: Bluetooth (mesh ?), Zigbee (3.0? dotdot?), LORA, Thread, WiFi, 5G, errrrm maybe even Z-Wave...

 

@petergebruers Your comment rather reminds me of the videotape wars of the 70s/80s (

Please login or register to see this link.

)

 

I am a bit scared that Zigbee bought Z-Wave because I can't help thinking it may have bought it to eventually bring its big corporate control attitude to control the market, similar to how J. P. Morgan started DC power generation and then forced Westinghouse to hand over Tesla's AC when it won the race, this led to the creation of General Electric.

 

The implementation of 5G is my bigger concern as the perceived need for my kettle talking directly to my fridge and other devices is something I struggle to understand the value of whilst I see the greatly enhanced risk of back doors for hacking therefrom.

 

I find I often rely on your advice and accept that whilst all this technology is fun for experts such as yourself, I have been searching for a simple solution, in as few hubs as possible, that, once set up, will manage my window coverings, lights, heating, security etc in a reliable and repetitive manner.

 

Is there any hope for us simple users?

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1 minute ago, PepsiMac said:

greatly enhanced risk of back doors for hacking

 

I wonder if we are soon approaching the time when knowing the user/pass admin/admin, will become a route to controlling a country's energy, water or defence system ?

 

Some time ago, I was told there are website on the dark web and elsewhere where people's cameras are hacked and one can view them, a concerning breach of privacy. Is that true and does that not make items like the Fibaro hub important barriers to such behaviour?

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1 hour ago, PepsiMac said:

Is the purpose of adding the zigbee chip to add weight to the box or does it suggest connectivity to zigbee devices?

Although I do not work for Fibaro, I can say with great certainty: the HC3 indeed initially ships with Z-Wave support only. I got the same info as mentioned a few posts back, "Zigbee by the end of the year".

 

Just now, PepsiMac said:

Your comment rather reminds me of the videotape wars of the 70s/80s (

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)

Yes

 

3 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

I am a bit scared that Zigbee bought Z-Wave because I can't help thinking it may have bought it to eventually bring its big corporate control attitude to control the market, similar to how J. P. Morgan started DC power generation and then forced Westinghouse to hand over Tesla's AC when it won the race, this led to the creation of General Electric.

You mean "Silabs" bought Z-Wave.

 

I don't know what their intentions were at the time, but it is no secret: the previous owner, Sigma, was not doing well and the wanted to sell Z-Wave (and their multimedia business).

 

Silabs is not killing Z-Wave, on the contrary, they have "opened up the specification" so eg NXP could make Z-Wave chips

 

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I quote:

 

Silicon Labs and Z-Wave Alliance announced plans to open the Z-Wave Specification as a ratified, multi-source wireless standard available to all silicon and stack vendors for development. By expanding access to Z-Wave as a standard supported by multiple semiconductor and software suppliers, the Z-Wave ecosystem will benefit both from broader technology support as well as accelerated market adoption.

The Z-Wave protocol is currently the foundation of the most mature and pervasive smart home ecosystem in the market today. With more than 100 million interoperable devices deployed, the Z-Wave ecosystem comprises more than 3,200 Z-Wave certified products provided by over 700 Z-Wave Alliance member companies.

 

7 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

The implementation of 5G is my bigger concern as the perceived need for my kettle talking directly to my fridge and other devices is something I struggle to understand the value of whilst I see the greatly enhanced risk of back doors for hacking therefrom.

In 2020 the technically inclined will talk about security and security breaches a lot... And privacy.

 

You know the "5G" guys are telecom giants and they can do one thing very well: cover large areas with data and voice access with reasonable battery life. They know one or two things about wireless networks. I would not underestimate them.  On the other hand, the phone companies tried to compete with ethernet and internet. Anyone still remember ATM aka Asynchronous Transfer Mode? Fiber to the desktop with voice and data combined? Maybe the world wasn't ready yet, for such an idea... Which is odd because it got superseded by IP aka Internet Protocol which took years to get multimedia support :D

 

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12 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

wonder if we are soon approaching the time when knowing the user/pass admin/admin, will become a route to controlling a country's energy, water or defence system ?

 

That has already happened and around mid Januari a large Belgian company was infected by "ransomware" , they had to shut down production.

 

I've worked mostly in ICT and I saw a shift from "Virus" which causes damage but is relatively easy to get rid of to "malware" usually meant to use your machine to target others and do harm to "ransomware" encrypting all your data, which then gets synced to some backup storage (eg google drive) and may make it difficult to restore your data...

 

16 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

Some time ago, I was told there are website on the dark web and elsewhere where people's cameras are hacked and one can view them, a concerning breach of privacy. Is that true and does that not make items like the Fibaro hub important barriers to such behaviour?

It is not my field of expertise but I read a few more in depth stories and what you say is probably true and there are basically 2 ways for attackers to enter: bugs in the O/S and simply guessing the (default) password.

 

I am sure some users on this forum are experts and they'll remind Fibaro form time to time: HC3 should be secure

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Many Thanks for your insights ....

 

29 minutes ago, petergebruers said:

Silabs is not killing Z-Wave, on the contrary, they have "opened up the specification" so eg NXP could make Z-Wave chips

 

Yes true. I did read about this so maybe it is more like the J. P. Morgan/GE approach. Without much technical knowledge in device protocols, Z-wave seems a lot more secure than a whole lot of wifi connected, energy hungry devices.

 

33 minutes ago, petergebruers said:

HC3 should be secure

 

I use z-wave rather than Arduino etc because I have a sense it is more secure and can only be accessed by the one controller.

 

Once again, Thank You for throwing some balanced light on these issues in a non "tech speak" manner that helps understanding.

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Power consumption (that is: active mains power)
 
HC2 - between 10 and 15 watt, hovering mostly around 14 W about 2 minutes after booting, and not doing anything silly like running tight loops but running my scenes as usual. This is an Intel processor and board from another era, pretty much what you would expect. In a cold climate, the energy is not lost, it heats your room.


HC3 - about 3 watt after booting, and idling... I don't have anything exciting scene-wise so let's run 4 tight loops to exercise all 4 cores. It hovers around 5 watt. Less heating for your room
 
I use the Zhurui LPT200 measuring device which is "pretty damn accurate" for this purpose :)

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.

Edited by jgab
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1 hour ago, petergebruers said:

Power consumption (that is: active mains power)

 

I was thinking more about wifi, understand that is much more power hungry than z-wave.

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30 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

I was thinking more about wifi, understand that is much more power hungry than z-wave.

 

I understood that you probably meant WiFi in general - but it reminded me to measure power of HC2 and HC3 and BTW that is with HC3 wifi on... :D

 

You want some standby power measurements of devices instead?

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1 hour ago, petergebruers said:

HC2 - between 10 and 15 watt, hovering mostly around 14 W about 2 minutes after booting, and not doing anything silly like running tight loops but running my scenes as usual. This is an Intel processor and board from another era, pretty much what you would expect. In a cold climate, the energy is not lost, it heats your room.


HC3 - about 3 watt after booting, and idling... I don't have anything exciting scene-wise so let's run 4 tight loops to exercise all 4 cores. It hovers around 5 watt. Less heating for your room

 

As a matter of interest, I checked the power consumption of my network cabinet which is:

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

 

174.50W for the Unifi switches, Synology NAS, modem etc (excluding two remote devices) makes the figures you provide as not a significant part of the consumption. The "P1" supply above has various items including 2 HC2s, 1 HCL, Hue hub, fans, BG Hive etc running only consumes 50.4W so clearly the HA is not where I can make significant savings.

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8 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

174.50W for the Unifi switc........etcetera

:)

 

Hehehe if you want to save the planet, forget about smart homes. Add all the energy needed to build the high tech devices to your power consumption, plus think about the amount of high tech waste in 5 to 10 years... Put baok those (old) light switches!

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8 hours ago, kevin said:

I have asked Fibaro support when the Zigbee protocol be enabled.

See the screenshot for the answer?.


So for now the HC3 is not more than a HC2 in a different box and UI.

 

 

Please login or register to see this attachment.

Sounds like a lot like 'Soon....'

IMHO this kind of promises is typical Fibaro, based on my personal experiences since I own a HC2 (2013). Their marketing department is probably very professional, listening to users is underdeveloped. That's one of the reasons I abandoned the HC2 as main automation hub and use it as Zwave controller only!

 

My automations are primarily done by Node Red and Home Assistant using MQTT broker(s) as central communication hub.

 

If I want to use other protocols/connecting devices,  Athom Homey is nice for Zigbee/IR/RF and Home Assistant can do a lot of other tasks, i.e. Multimedia/Unify/IP-Camera/Synology/Lot-of-other integrations.

 

I can do things in minutes what the HC2, or even (probably) a HC3, could never achieve. So would I (pre-)order the HC3? Definitely Not!

 

Just my 2 cents.

Edited by Lambik
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1 hour ago, petergebruers said:

Hehehe if you want to save the planet, forget about smart homes. Add all the energy needed to build the high tech devices to your power consumption, plus think about the amount of high tech waste in 5 to 10 years... Put baok those (old) light switches!

 

Please login or register to see this image.

/monthly_2020_01/148260038_SmileyOhBoy.png.e99a9845a6971925b255703e76da6814.png" />

Where did I put those light switches ?  Maybe I need to surrender and employ a butler. Does Fibaro make a butler v2.0? ?

After our conversation, I have updated my profile pic to reflect how I feel.

 

29 minutes ago, Lambik said:

My automations are primarily done by Node Red and Home Assistant using MQTT broker(s) as central communication hub.

 

It seems one phrase you will never hear in the world of automation is "All I want is an easy life!"

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1 hour ago, Lambik said:

MQTT

It is one of my feature requests.

 

43 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

employ a butler

Call her "Alexa?"

 

43 minutes ago, PepsiMac said:

All I want is an easy life!

Yes. The door to the cellar switches the light on/off. Why... Because we tend to forget to turn off the light... But because the door does not stay shut if you don't push hard enough, I added a timer to send a mail after 15 minutes and switch off the light. But then ... on a bad day... you are in the dark when you forget about this timer and stumble in the dark. So before turning off the light, you blink it a few times and if someone switches the light within at minute, you reset that timer. Nice! But this solution has a bad WAF. So you start dreaming about ... adding a motion sensor. Or two sensors actually, to cover the blind spots... Maybe I should fix that door.

 

Yes, HC3 certainly can make life easy, as easy as your HC2 can. Or HASS, node red, IObroker, ...

Edited by petergebruers
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