On the latest episode of Home: On, Richard is joined by Mike Faucher to discuss how consumers interested in adopting home automation technology now have more options than ever. What’s the best way to get started? These days, you only have to look as far as your local retailer. The time has come for popularized home control tech. Of course, you may also want to think about ways of making it all more palatable for the rest of your household.
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Show Links
- Target selling WeMo
- INSTEON starter kits at Best Buy and Costco
- INSTEON Hub First Impressions
- HomeSeer 3 beta available
- Lowe’s selling Iris home automation kits
- Goji Smart Lock
- INSTEON Smoke Hub and Leak Detector
- The Doc’s World
- BYOB Podcast on homeservershow.net
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Richard – Thanks for the mention! A few quick points some might find helpful:
HS3 has been under development for roughly 3 years now and should be released as a final product before the end of the year. Pricing has been set for HS3 and we’re not planning an increase for the official release.
A great deal of work has gone into improving the user experience in terms of workflow and logical layout. The setup area, in particular has been greatly simplified while retaining (and improving on) features from HS2. Navigation has also been improved with a new menu system and with jquery-enabled controls.
Our event engine also has been completely rewritten using a more universal boolean logic flow (if / and / or / then). It is much easier to create complex events with conditions and multiple triggers. Event element order can also be changed with simple drag/drop operations. “Counters” and “Timers” have also been added to the event engine and these will open up a lot of new possibilities to HomeSeer users.
Event organization has been dramatically improved with tour new Event Group feature and the addition of event “group conditions” and “group actions” allows users to easily modify the behavior of any or all events within a group. The benefit is that users can now create an event group called “Manage Lighting” that includes all their lighting events. A group condition can be added to track the status of the home (occupancy status, vacation status, etc) and the behavior of any or all events in the group can be altered by simply changing the group condition.
Our HS3 upgrade product includes a listing of other new features and may be accessed from our store product link here: http://store.homeseer.com/store/x-P1527C5.aspx. A fully functional beta version may also be downloaded and trialed. I would highly encourage anyone interested to do this as the screen shots alone don’t do it justice.
You’ll also be happy to know our little HomeTroller project has not been abandoned and details about its progress will be released very shortly. Stay tuned!
Anyone interested in learning more is invited to contact us directly. You can use the email form here ( http://www.homeseer.com/company/contact_us.htm ) or just pick up the phone and call us.
-Mark Colegrove
HomeSeer Technologies
Thanks for the comment with all of the information, Mark. As you probably noticed, we really only touched on the items that most interested me, largely from the upgrade page that you reference here. I really appreciate the pricing information—that’s not something I was able to find on homeseer.com.
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