It has been a year since Vera was acquired. Any chance we see a new firmware? Any chance we see a new UI? Any timelines that you care to share, all talk about transparency yet very little has been shared. Disappointed user? Yes I am, frustrated with my system yes.
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They released 7.0.29 at the end of April, which brought a significant increase in reliability (as evidenced by a sharp reduction in spontaneous reloads). Since then, they’ve apparently had three different development forks going, all of which have been discussed here in these forums:
- Ongoing development of 7.0.30, which is pending beta shortly as inferred from comments made by an engineer here that was updating packages as fast as we requested them;
- Development of their own RTOS, which has been realized in the recent Atom Beta, now in the hands of an untold number of us for the last two weeks or so;
- Development of a Linux rewrite of the current Luup engine, which is a substantial undertaking, and for this we do not yet have announced expectations with respect to schedule, but it’s not hard to imagine that rewriting ten years worth of accrued engineering history is going to take a bit of time.
We’ve also seen several versions of the Android VeraMobile app, and since I’m not a regular iOS user, I can’t tell you how many versions of the Apple VeraMobile app.
I don’t know how many engineers they now have, but that’s a lot of work getting done, and a lot of coordination to maintain across a lot of people. Been there, done it, so I really appreciate the challenges it presents, not to mention the sudden need to reinvent the corporate culture while retaining key people.
I think they’re off to a pretty good start. Is everything we want in our hands today? No. Is everything they next release going to be perfect? Also, no. But as I said elsewhere in this community this morning, “good, fast, or cheap… choose at most two”. Good will always be on my list, and anything else a distant second. I now have the confidence that they will get there.
And I’m extremely pleased that I can say that moreso than ever before, Vera/eZLO is listening to us. They can’t do everything we ask for in the moment right when we ask, but I get positive feedback from their engineering team that things are on their radar than ever before–it was pretty much never before a year ago.
I’m actually really happy with the way my system runs today, but lawd knows I was pretty bitter about 18 months ago. The first marked improvement came from uninstalling every plugin I was using that didn’t have an active supporter, no exceptions. I replaced those with better tools, and when better tools weren’t around, I wrote them (and published them here). Between that and 7.0.29, it’s been life-changing. If you’re still experiencing instability, I’d encourage you to take a hard look at what’s on your system. You may have some pet plugins that need to be put to pasture.
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Thank you rigpapa for your response, we do not use our Vera presently because of the instability, scenes not running because of it rebooting, not getting notifications in a timely manner etc etc. We wanted to use our Vera for automation and not as a glorified remote.
My point being is that it has been a year and very little has been shared as far as what/when we will reach some significant progress into stability and not having the system reboot, geo fencing working 75% of the time, notifications coming in hours later, Bluetooth devices where do we stand with that?
When the takeover occurred we heard how great everything would be, well we are still waiting. The only posts I see from the company is Sorin trying to tow the company line saying it is on our road map, it is in progress, we are looking at it etc etc etc.
While it’s not unreasonable to expect Vera to work out of the box, your description does seem to be a somewhat extreme situation. I think most of us are in a rather better place.
Certainly has some frustrations, but taking what Rigpapa and Rafael have delivered in the stability and plug ins, it’s certainly getting there
Cheers
C
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hi JaneAuto,
First of all please accept my apologies that you are not able to get what you want from the platform.
Here is what we have done so far:
1)Built from scratch 2 new hardware platforms (one for our own RTOS-Real Time Operating System), one for Linux based system
2)Built from scratch 2 new Firmware framework RTOS and Linux Based. We launched the RTOS based Firmware along with its hardware called Ezlo Atom.
3)We hope to release the Linux firmware (not backward compatible) that should run with your existing hardware (please bear in mind this is a total re-write and at first release it won’t be backward compatible with configurations you may have…need to treat it like a brand new installation. We are working on giving a Beta Launch date for this, the code is ready-ish, you can perhaps try that when ready and give us your feedback?)
4)We released 7.0.29…fingers crossed about to deliver 7.0.30 very soon…
5)We hope to enable Security Monitoring in 7.0.30
we have much much more coming…we had to re-build literally everything so that we can maintain it properly while we scale on it.
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I can say that the best thing I did was get a VeraSecure off fleabay… Moving from a Vera 3 to the upgraded device has been night and day with reliability. I can’t say that it was because of the upgraded hardware or firmware that was able to be installed that fixed the issues I was having with dropped devices, and general slowness, but I can say it is nice now. I am also Beta Testing the new Atom and so far it has been pretty spiffy as well.
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Melih thank you for your response. As I said I am Vera customer, and will wait to see the new Ezlo vision come to fruition.
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As a non expert user I find it really difficult working out which plugins are sensible to use eg weren’t designed for UI5, are actively developed etc. You often have to read through pages and pages of comments in the forums as many don’t have pinned posts with current info. There still seem to be several sources of information and ways to install plugins.
I completely agree that this is a problem. I’m probably going to be called a heretic or worse, but I’m hoping Vera/eZLO does something with future firmware that is completely breaking to the existing interfaces, and as a result, every plugin that doesn’t have an active maintainer to upgrade it gets the “Thanos snap” right outta here. It’s well past time to clean house.
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Totally agree with you. I would love to see that. I totally screwed up my system once by installing an app that was not really compatible with UI7.
I’ve had no such problems after upgrade
some have had no issues, others have. Not sure what your point is.
Great sounds like a lots has been achieved but with the last firmware release all my Fibaro 3 in 1 sensors now create a ghost device reported months ago and still no fix…also they have never reported battery levels correctly, if these were some weird Chinese (whoops) devices I could perhaps understand why, also I have the same sporadic scence running problem that JaneAuto experiences…we need a fix for this
Im sure I’ll like what is coming but can we just fix these two issues please
@Melih, what about the statement “we will support every single device out there”? Since the takeover I have also read a lot “we are working and stay tuned’s” but since I am still have A LOT (ask support: Radu Bojica, Ionut Sinatovici, Omar Gonzalez, Lorena, integration team, “other teams” etc.) of problems with devices in Vera. Ghost devices appearing, can’t detect device, unresponsiveness, etc…
We are building a whole new firmware (one version was launched with Atom Beta). With this new Firmware platform we will be able to support all commercially available devices.
But I don’t want new, I need better. Do you have a running domotica system at home you have set up yourself and putten all of your spare time and energy in it? For the last 10 years? I think if the answer is yes you will see why I don’t want new but better…
you just want to press the “update” button and have something “better”…I get that.
For us to be able to give you that…we had to re-write the whole platform…
Pretty much yes or “migrate” with PLEG, apps, etc., else I can as well easily go to home assistant e.g.
No disagreement on the fact that a new platform would probably be necessary to fix some of the flaws of the the current ones but as I expressed in the other thread with you, it would be easy to make it better. Not perfect, but better. There are a number of over automation in the engine which could be disabled and make the system much better and these, you seem to say I am underestimating and I still disagree because I have already implemented some of them and the remaining were coded by your team in no time when I asked. I just don’t understand why it takes so long before you let people test them. There are more which are needed from which I have not heard. As I said, most are about disabling flawed ideas in the code, not about creating anything new.
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My concern is the availability of a migration path if an entire rewrite is underway. I have hundreds of devices, hundreds of PLEG logic, etc. If i have to do a total rebuild, I’ll be forced to at least consider other platforms.
To be clear, this isn’t a threat. I’ve been a pro-Vera consumer for years and “sold” a number of units to family and friends. This is just me being a reasonable consumer and keeping options open.
Here’s to hoping there will be a clean migration for us longtime and loyal customers.