{"id":22858,"date":"2014-06-09T07:54:38","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T06:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/?p=22858"},"modified":"2020-04-19T17:32:27","modified_gmt":"2020-04-19T16:32:27","slug":"review-the-eedomus-z-wave-home-automation-controller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/reviews\/review-the-eedomus-z-wave-home-automation-controller.html","title":{"rendered":"Review: The eedomus Z-Wave Home Automation Controller"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bon soirs mes petits topinambours! Bienvenue to the Automated Home review of the latest home automation offering from France, the eedomus Z-Wave Controller. These things are Les Fromages Grandes in their native country\u00a0by all account and Vesternet is now bringing them across the channel. We had a brief opportunity to play with one, and the salient features are presented below.<\/p>\n

The eedomus box is an all-in-one stand-alone controller that comes with Z-Wave and IP CCTV camera support as standard. In addition it’s compatible with the En-Ocean dongle (40 EUR), and also the RFXCOM USB dongle<\/a> (110 EUR).\u00a0Even xPL<\/a> gets a look in! It’s a Linux box, of course, running a Samsung ARM9 processor and 64MB of RAM.<\/p>\n

It should be noted up front that the eedomus box prefers<\/em>\u00a0(but does not require<\/em>) a subscription to\u00a0the eedomus cloud service, which will set you back 6 EUR a month. For this you will get ‘multi-year\u00a0data storage’, 30 SMS notification messages a month, and 10GB for your CCTV images. If you opt out of\u00a0the subscription you don’t get any of that. The box seems to come with 3 months of gratis service, and commendably\u00a0the ongoing subscription is opt-in<\/em> rather than opt-out<\/em> once your freebie runs out.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/p>\n

Regular readers will know that one of my pet peeves with these Euro-boxes is the dreaded continental power plug,\u00a0usually bundled with a bulky travel adaptor by the retailer. The eedomus makes a good first impression right off\u00a0the bat – it’s powered by a regular USB adaptor, which they’ve provided and it’s got a UK plug! Magnifique!<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/p>\n

As well as controller\u00a0itself you get an Ethernet cable, a quick-start guide and copious amounts of cardboard.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/p>\n

Plug the box into the power and your LAN (there’s no WiFi) and you’re good to go. You get a couple of USB sockets for expandability\u00a0and four RJ12 ports for future interfaces or for hooking up your own homebrew equipment (more on this later). The quick-start guide points you towards the website for\u00a0registration, or you can use the eedomus app which is available for iOS and Android. I opted to use the website,\u00a0which prompts you for the usual details, verifies your email address, and then tells you that it’s downloading\u00a0the latest firmware to the controller.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/p>\n

I was expecting it to tell me it when it had finished installing the firmware, but that didn’t happen, so I left\u00a0it half an hour and rebooted it, which seemed to have the desired effect. Also note that where it says “click on\u00a0Settings” it means “click on Configuration”. This website is the gateway to all the box’s features and configuration.\u00a0It’s built on the well-respected ExtJS widget toolkit so should work well in all modern browsers, and they’ve gone\u00a0to great lengths to make it look a lot like Windows 7, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your\u00a0predilections.<\/p>\n

All this chicanery comes at a cost though, which is that your browser back button no longer works as\u00a0you’d expect, as is common with these sorts of sites. “Don’t use the back button, use the breadcrumbs” the documentation\u00a0exhorts stoically, but trust me, this rapidly becomes infuriating. The eedomus’ Gallic heritage is also often visible in the sometimes\u00a0hilarious translations, and sometimes the translations are entirely missing. Sadly this often seems to be the case\u00a0with error messages, where the box will berate you in French in angry small red lettering. Google chrome continually\u00a0prompts to translate the page from French to English, even when no French text is visible on the page. No doubt this is an area\u00a0which will quickly improve as the UK user-base grows.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/p>\n

While we’re on the subject of websites, I’d like to take a moment to mention the LAN page – that is, the web site\u00a0you get if you visit the eedomus from your local LAN rather than via the internet. The eedomus tells you the LAN\u00a0IP address on initial configuration, and as you can see, if you put this in your browser you get a very different\u00a0view of things. For some reason, you’re now getting an entirely different web page, designed for iPhone screen\u00a0dimensions. It’s not responsive; you can make the screen as big as you like, the icons will still cling nervously\u00a0to the left hand edge. More alarmingly, this is a very simple command and control interface. A coffee-table interface,\u00a0if you will. You’re not going to be doing any device configuring or programming from this bad boy, it\u2019s all done through\u00a0the eedomus cloud service (which will continue to work even without a subscription, despite what eedomus\u2019 documentation\u00a0says in places – we have checked this fact comprehensively).<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/a><\/p>\n

Getting back to the main interface, the welcome screen that greets you has category icons for a very high-level\u00a0overview, whereas clicking on ‘configuration’ gets you a more useful per-device view. You can see that the box\u00a0includes a number of ‘virtual’ devices such as temperature, current day, time of day etc (including the frankly\u00a0baffling ‘tomorrow’ device). This is central to the\u00a0eedomus way of doing things. All devices conform to the same pattern regardless of how they’re connected, and they\u00a0can all be controlled and scripted (or accessed via the extremely comprehensive HTTP API) in the same way, after a\u00a0fashion. Just about everything can trigger an email, SMS or push notification alert too.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/a><\/p>\n

You can click on the device icons to modify their parameters and appearance. For sensor type devices you get the\u00a0ability to choose the display type: a simple icon-based sentinel arrangement, or graphs of historical values (again,\u00a0subscription only). Bizarrely, the ‘circular gauge’ and ‘linear gauge’ options require Flash, which seems a trifle\u00a0baroque in these days of HTML5, CSS3, and SVG.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/a>
\n\"eedomus<\/a><\/p>\n

This page is also where you access the ‘add device’ functionality, which offers the usual Z-Wave enrolment and\u00a0IP camera stuff, but also has the intriguing “add another kind of device” option which leads to a simply vast\u00a0array of devices that the box is keen to talk to: EnOcean and RFXCOM require additional hardware, but there’s\u00a0also XPL, uPNP, HTML actuator and device APIs, HTML web page snapshots, GPS, Phillips Hue, Withings smart body\u00a0analysers, RFID, Karotz and Nabaztag, Freebox (some kind of funky programmable router\/wireless AP), Koubachi (for\u00a0monitoring plants – the leafy kind, not the pipey kind), Netatmo<\/a> (weather station), Teleinfo (some sort of\u00a0smart-metering interface), and UPS monitoring.<\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/a> \"eedomus<\/a><\/p>\n

\"eedomus<\/a>If that’s not enough for you, you can hook up your own gear to the aforementioned RJ12 jacks and control digital\u00a0inputs and outputs, measure analogue voltage levels, or do pulse counting. Information on the ports is not easy\u00a0to find but this page<\/a>\u00a0gives you the low down on\u00a0what’s possible with the wired interfaces. This page also mentions the three clicky buttons on the top of the\u00a0controller, which otherwise go completely unmentioned, but it looks like you can configure them to do whatever\u00a0you like (tip: use the ‘digital input’ device type and set the ‘pine’ option to ‘central button’, ‘small bow’,\u00a0or ‘large bow’). The link above warns that “Long press the center button in seconds starting from the box may cause a food”\u00a0(according to google translate) which seems like an excellent feature, but sadly this seems not to be the case.<\/p>\n