kirnmalidus
Junior Member
- Jan 16, 2016
- 7
- 0
- 0
Honestly, I am not at all happy with where things are in the HA world. Manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot & missing out on ridiculous amounts of money by not standardizing, because things are so buggy & support is so limited (no one system supports everything) that people get really frustrated. Not to mention how expensive everything still is...it's still $60 for a stupid lightswitch from Lutron! So the biggest barrier to entry is cost, and then once you get it, you find out that not everything plays nice with your system (look at the Control4 article above, it doesn't even have Spotify support!) & you'll run into weird bugs where things will act funny or quit working or you'll have to re-pair stuff. It's ridiculous!
I've had a bit of luck trying for a merged system of Wink and HomeKit. Pretty much everything I'm using is compatible with both platforms, and I'm controlling it with tools for both.
This lets me use HomeKit's scenes, triggers and apps that support it as well as the Apple TV remote access bridge for the HomeKit devices and Wink's Robots, Shortcuts and app for the Wink devices.
There are only a few things that are in only one system or neither, like the Elgato eve door/window sensor and weather station and the netatmo weather station (yes, I have two weather stations) or the Quirky egg minder (I know it's ridiculous, but it's only $10 on Amazon right now).
Also, with this approach if one controller or system isn't working for some reason I have a redundant backup I can use. That also helps me confirm if it is the controller I was using or the specific device (I'm looking at you Hue bridge).