Choosing the right Controller
-
Hi there, im fairly new to all this and have been reading through the forum for the last few weeks. I'm expecting a RPi in the mail any week now, but i'm still not sure which controller I should go with. Should i choose PiDome or Domoticz?? Or DomotiGa?? I'd like to be able to have a good mobile interface on my Android (Samsung S7) phone, and i'm on a farm (4 hectares or 10 acres) so I'm hoping to be able to have sensors and actuators all over the property so need to be able to have fairly good range. Any tips / advice in terms of choosing the controller would be great. Also if you choose a controller and then decide you don't like it how hard is it to change later on?? Thanks!
-
@breimann - Hi and Welcome!
Its a hard question. The range isnt dependent on the controller but on the radio you choose. You should look at those things you talk about. Myself i use Domoticz and im happy with the mobile interface. Cant say anything about the others.
hard is it to change later on
Its the same amount of work as you will have when you install your first controller. What will happen is that you loose all your data you gathered.
-
@sundberg84 Thank-you this is helpful info. Much appreciated.
-
What controller have you decided to use?
I'm also deciding which controller to choose. I'm using Mysensors v2.
Does PiDome/Domoticz/Openhab work with MySensors v2? Or should I use MySensors v1.5?
-
I went with Domoticz. I also have the paid version of the Domoticz android app. I tried the lite version, but I wanted to try some stuff with geofencing which was only available with the paid version. One thing that I liked about Domoticz was that it had native support for Dallas 1-Wire. I already had a network of 1-Wire sensors around the house and that worked right off the bat. In looking at some of the other controllers, their support didn't seem to be as good for some of the hardware I already had. I chose Domoticz because it was free.
There seems to be a lot of great support for Vera, but that is a hardware device that you must purchase ($149.95 US for the Vera Plus). Since my Raspberry Pi died I found a new board of similar size called an OrangePi PC. I picked it up for $17 US and it has been working well with Domoticz. It has a GPIO header that is pin compatible to the R-Pi. Haven't used it for much other than the serial port pins that I have my gateway connected to. The unit is like the R-Pi in that it boots from a micro-SD card, but I use an external hard drive as the main drive with the micro-SD pointing to it at boot. I did this to reduce the failure of the SD card from too many writes. I went through a few with my R-Pi even buying ones with wear leveling.
Bottom line, you can get a pretty decent system running with a cheap computer board and Domoticz.
-
@dbemowsk said:
geofencing
Im using DomoFence for geofencing and webgui for other. Couldnt get the other app to work with geofence - just a hint for you if you run into trouble with that.
Domoticz is as you say a great tool and cheap. Might be a little more work but if you are going for low cost project like me Domoticz is great.
-
@sundberg84 said:
Im using DomoFence for geofencing and webgui for other. Couldnt get the other app to work with geofence
I do have the geofencing in the Domoticz app somewhat working. My test scenario was to have a script that would close my garage door once I left the fence area. The problem I ran into was that when I would come home, it wouldn't register right away that I was inside the fence area, so when I would open my garage door, it would think I was outside the fence area and shut it right away. I think that might be an issue with the phone and not Domoticz.
