Wondering what mobile app (Android) people are using for creating custom dashboard pages to control Vera on your phones and wall mounted tablets ?
I’ve been using Imperihome for a long time now, it seems to be one of the best apps for easily creating dashboard pages, with no need to be a code programming expert.
I had a bit of a rant over on the Vera Mobile app Android preview thread, seems their “new” single customisable dashboard page is very lacking in imagination and not looking good so far.
Update: There is a brand new Ezlo app being developed along side improvements being made to the existing Vera app.
I also created a lot of my own icons and used a mixture of those and the ones that come with the Imperihome app. I can easily lock the app down and only give my daughter access to the dashboard pages and you can also lock individual widgets with a pin code, which is good for the Vera House modes, for example so you have to enter a pin code when entering Home mode which disables the alarm system.
I also like the fact that Imperihome supports Logitech Harmony and Philips Hue natively. And using widget buttons with http json commands behind them I can also control aspects of the Vera / Harmony plug-in and its API or any other IP device that supports posting http commands to it.
Another good feature of Imperihome is the Composite widgets so you can add more than one device in to a widget for control, for example group several lights together in to a single Composite widget and then you can control all of those individual lights via the one widget in the Imperihome app.
I’ve used Vera for over 10 years and I’ve never used the official Vera mobile app as I just never liked it and you can not customise it or lock down areas of the app for other family members, so they cannot get in to the Vera settings and configuration areas etc.
Home Habit app is a newish app that is in Beta which looks promising also and supports multiple platforms. Vera has experimental support currently.
Here is my Imperihome app running on an Android / Amazon Fire 7 tablet. We just normally use the Dashboard page views and not the List views of the app.
There are some videos on Youtube to get started. But yes it does have a learning curve from what I’ve read about it and its not something as easy as say Imperihome or Home Habit.
don’t wanna highjack the thread but I tried out The Home Remote and have mixed feelings. Right off the bat I loved how well it integrated my harmony devices, ive been waiting for a single app that brings together my vera and harmony properly. I also enjoy the Sonos integration, as good as the plugins have gotten on the vera side the mobile UI lets them down, so to have proper control of my speakers is great. Heres where things aren’t so great… it only works locally or over a VPN which is kind of a bummer. The designer app does require A LOT of setup, and I wish I could import my already roughly configured mobile app into the designer and alter it from there instead of starting from scratch. I do however see a good future for this app just as long as its maintained hopefully.
The designer is very complicated not sure if i have the patience to learn it.
I managed to add a Harmony button to send a device command to my TV. And a button to run a Vera scene. No idea how to add a button for a Z-Wave switch.
And couldn’t figure out how to add new menu items to link to a new page.
It’s certainly not an app you can just pick up easy and start designing your dashboard pages
If you’re talking about Home Remote… egads(!) it would take an infinite amount of patience – and technical comprehension, and time, practically speaking – to set up fully, not to mention troubleshoot, no matter how modest your system.
While I consider it to have amazing potential in the right hands, for many it’s scarcely a step above writing your own JSON file, IMHO.
These are Logitech Harmony buttons to control my Humax DVR box.
SkipBack button does not work for some reason but all the other buttons work OK.
The “On” button turns on the Harmony Watch TV activity. I don’t know how to create a button to turn off the Harmony activity.
Obviously the design layout and buttons icons could be improved but just playing around with it.
I can’t work out the difference between Groups and creating your own Pages in the Designer. I created a new blank page for this remote control and added grids and buttons etc.
Also if I change on the phone from portrait to landscape view in landscape its all messed up, so presumably you have to build the same pages twice? For different screen orientations.
This designer would take months to learn and to develop your own custom dashboard app.
Honestly the designer feels like its better suited for a developer launching their own app out to the public, not so much for an end user. The Designer needs to be more streamlined to cut down time and complexity.
I can create “Groups” in the designer and then assign devices to those groups. These devices then appear using the default “tiles” as you can see in these screen shots.
And then you can create “Pages” and add your own buttons to that page as I did for the remote control page. However I don’t know how to add their “tiles” to pages.
I just realised if I click on one of the Harmony activity tiles it then brings up another page, a remote control page that the system has auto generated. So looks l like I don’t need to create my own remote control pages as it builds them for you !
