MIOS Acquisition

I understand @rigpapa that you are using reactor and unless reactor works with ezlo you can’t use it because reactor has great capabilities etc. That still doesn’t make the zwave stack (which is the question I was answering, not the scene creation capability) it has “basic”.

The question i was answering is repeated below:

I remember the excitement we all felt reading the news of the Mios acquisition, but to tell The truth after 1yr and a half I’m not happy at all. There has been some stability improvement for sure, and some more devices are now supported, but as an end user I see many devices not supported or not working well, a complete drop on vera plus and Vera secure feature (zigbee still left behind, Bluetooth removed, the lack of security like S2 for a “secure” hub - so I’m wondering why I bought a VP) and a really slow firmware development.
I understand Ezlo is investing in new products, but right now The old one’s do not work properly (and there are more new devices that The one you are supporting) and the new one’s are far from beeing a replacement.
I remember Vera said they hired many more engineers, but splitting them on so many areas (backend, online services, Linux firmware, old firmware, iOS and Android apps) didn’t show a real change.

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I don’t know if you saw my post this morning about what worked and what didn’t with mios and overall I feel like you are redoing and changing a large part of what worked while not evidently doing anything about what didn’t.
Truth be told, with a lot of work and tweaking and a little help from your devs on changing, updating, refactoring the zwave and the zigbee stack, the old vera could be the benchmark on the market because of the great things about it: lua, the local UI and API which are much better than all the others I looked at. We could almost live with all the other idiotic defects on the rest of the firmware with hopes that they would get gradually fixed and would have community generated workarounds or enhancements.
When ezlo acquired mcv we were indeed excited about the perspective of some major changes but we are indeed almost 2 years down the road and starting something brand new has become more of a burden than excitement. Especially when it offers so little extra functionality if at all. It’s interesting but meh… we can already pretty much everything with open source software on much better hardware and more mature platforms. So why not just use what worked, enhance it, put new hardware out to improve on the same platform, evolve it rather than radically change everything? Just a thought.

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I agree not sure the old ones will ever work properly.
Not sure why Ezlo continues to sell the Vera line if it is not working as advertised.

The fiasco with the latest firmware still leaves a bitter taste, how could it have been released? Why?

I am sure everyone is working hard but as Bill Gates said.

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

Maybe its time for Ezlo to move on from the Vera line and focus on their own Ezlo products, this way as Vera end users we know our future.

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Personally, I’m watching HS4 and Hubitat closely as I’m fed up with all the Vera issues and the recent 7.30 Charlie Foxtrot where Vera/Ezlo went MIA leaving us all severly pissed off with our borked and unstable VP’s!

Frankly since 7.29 the Vera FW has been mostly an unstable mess, 7.31 is better but seems to have caused a lot of folk here issues (thankfully my VP seems ok on 7.31).

If that’s how you feel, just don’t update the firmware. I prefer them to actually try make things better than just ditch us. There seems to be quite a few people that are very trigger happy on updating their system while not actually benefiting from any of the new features. I understand, and agree with the idea that a released firmware should work but given the track record why tempt fate?

I would agree with you 100%. I do not want them to ditch us, but if that is the plan I hope they do the right thing and tell Vera users of our fate.

People update so that it can fix issues that the firmware has. It is pretty simple.

We were promised a new RTOS FW for our Edge and Plus units as they are vastly more powerful than what is required to be a great HAC. The only reason they arent fast now is all the baggage and poor decisions made under the MCV ownership.

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I agree, After much investigation, I can see that the hardware is plenty capable and these units have no justifications for replacements from a capability perspective.
Even the limited RAM and flash memory are weaknesses which can be easily worked with if used properly and I truly believe that’s what the RTOS firmwares will do.
The issue to me is speed of execution and compatibility.

Putting out too steep of a learning curve and people will bail to other more mature platforms. Taking too much time to deliver it will cause the same. New products from eZLO are coming out but the firmware so far is lightyears from matching the old capabilities. It’s rough.

I am seeing in various forum an increase of “hybrid” setups: Home Assistant as the automation layer, controlling Hubitat as a device controller. Some people do this also with Home Assistant and openhab and a vera, here many use openluup + vera. I am moving towards openluup + z-way+ homeassistant. Heck I even toyed with Homeseer + vera hardware, bypassing the vera software.

In my years of software development I’ve seen situations like this before. A product goes through many many changes in response to users requests for new features or to deal with errors and malfunction. Unfortunately those making changes don’t really understand what’s already there. The long term result is that the additions/changes/hacks create a design that is unworkable and unmaintainable. Perhaps I’m being optimistic but my hope is that the coming RTOS version will incorporate all that was learned along the way into the next generation. Of course this presumes that the development team is working from a well designed and documented list of requirements. You can’t hit a moving target and you have to have something to test against. For a product that is expected to run 24/7 365 testing should be automated and it should run 24/7 as well. I’m probably expecting too much.

I have no idea what Ezlo is doing. There seems to be no focus, with capacity split as it seems to be; current users are apparently not the main target audience of the new product line, or at least the step will be so steep it will be like starting over; the expert users don’t get the respect they deserve; firmware upgrades are a disaster: no way that I’ll upgrade, risking having no HA for days or weeks. Meanwhile support is not even really trying, with emails not being read and asking stupid questions.

Perhaps the Ezlo line could become something, some day. But we’ll see when we get there. Atm it’s work in progress, or an innovation project that will have to proof itself. Meanwhile, during the next few years i want a machine that is kept up to date. And no, suggesting not to upgrade is the opposite of what I want and expect: i want frequent easy upgrades adding support and fixes. And i don’t believe Vera will ever be given that.

So, if for the next few year(s?) Ezlo can’t offer me a decent Vera nor a decent replacement, what am i supposed to do? @melih, do you recognize this problematic situation and could you take a firm stand: are you here still (really) for the current users?

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I just received an answer to my months outstanding support request on why loads of devices do not send back their status to vera anymore. Hours of support calls and several support engineers… they even touched the “level 3” support team… want to know the outcome?

Try to exclude and include.

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Ugh, I’ve actually gotten the “reset to factory default and re-add all devices.” if i were to do that for the 50 or so devices i have, i would probably do it on another platform.

I am so sorry… :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :joy: :rofl: :laughing:

If I may… If you have the time, try adding a secondary controller to your network and see what is going on. The vera zwave interface is grossly obscure, lacking and reload prone.
Very likely, for your devices to not send back status, it would be that their lifeline associations got messed up. For this to happen to many devices at once, it should mean that your vera may have changed node id. It is possible also that some secondary controller or the vera itself sent a command to change these devices lifeline associations but a little less. If it is the former, Try restoring (with zwave network restore) from a backup pre dating these events. Pay close attention to the device ID in the zwave menu. If you don’t have that use a better zwave controller like the silabs PC controller with a zwave stick, openzwave or use z-way, and go back to the devices to change their lifeline associations back to the id of the vera.

Treating the vera as if it needed black magic like waiting and voodooing around needs to stop. Zwave is a pretty solid and well thought set of hardware and protocol. You should never wait for anything and even less need to exclude/include a device to fix it. This type of answers are out of desperation and ignorance. It is akin to the stupidity of “something is wrong, lets reload luup” or “let’s reboot” but the vera doesn’t do that right? We call it the shotgun approach, except in my world we drive to root cause to generate corrective actions even when we do it. Here it seems to be missing.

Had this with my FIbaro attached temperature sensors. Eventually resolved by a fellow forum member!

C

How do I do that?

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Vera alternative

Hi guys, I had to split the competitor references into a new topic.
Please stick to the topic. Thank you for your understanding.

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It was getting completely off topic and you are perfectly right to split it off. Thank you Sorin

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