Just a quick note to let people know that I’ve had a new article published by Residential Tech Today Magazine on RoomMe and their new integration with IFTTT and Hubitat. For those not familiar with RoomMe, they are sensors that track individuals in a home as they move from room to room through Bluetooth connectivity with their smart phones or watches. This information can then be used by a smart home processor / hub to play a person’s favorite music, adjust lights, and more. You can find the full article here:
For those interested in earlier articles that I've written, you can find those here:
I don't like their integration. You have to define all the automations in RoomMe and it basically requires you to create virtual switches in HE. I want the other way, I want RoomMe to be a presence sensor and let HE do the work.
I haven't tried integrating RoomMe directly with Hubitat. However, I wrote the Crestron RoomMe driver and worked quite a bit with the product.
I found that using the intelligence that Intellithings has built into RoomMe was much better than getting raw data from the device and trying to handle all the logic yourself. RoomMe takes care of understanding complexities like priorities between different people in a room at the same time and who is the owner of a room.
For example if you are using RoomMe to automatically turn on music to people's playlists as they move from room to room, a parent may have priority over a child in a house but if a child is listening to music in their own room just because a parent walks into the room the music shouldn't change to the parents favorite station.
This is all built into RoomMe and keeps the logic on the smart home processor / hub from becoming overly complex.
The way RoomMe reports ownership changes in a room as various people may be moving in and out I found worked very well.
Looking around there website it looks like you could get the api to send http events to a server of your choice and drive all of the logic on the receiving system. That said it would probably take some development to get it working.
I spoke to the folks at Intellithings and here are their instructions for integrating Hubitat with RoomMe.
RoomMe will send triggers when the highest priority person in a room changes. This could be, for example,
-because someone walks into an empty room
-when a child is in a general room in the house and a parent enters,
-when two people are in a room and the one with the highest priority exits
-when the last person exits a room
-etc.
Hubitat just has to handle the message as to who is now the top priority person in a room and set the music, lighting, hvac temperature to their preference or turn things off when the room becomes empty.
As I said, I haven't tried connecting RoomMe directly to Hubitat so I can't say whether the choice that Intellithings made in doing that is the best way or if it could have been done differently and made bettter. But working with the product I found that their handling of priorities between people in a home was way better than trying to do it on your own. They put a lot of thought into the logic.
I read through the Groovy code in that post. Unfortunately, your post is not quite accurate. It is the way I described it. You select a list of devices to expose to RoomMe and RoomMe controls them. On top of this, only certain devices are supported - lights (on/off and color, but NOT color temperature). Thermostats (and weirdly if you set the setpoint to 70 it will set the heating to 68 and the cooling to 70??? that makes no sense). The the third option is to execute an arbitrary command which is actually very scary to me. It actually lets me pass a string, converts it to groovy code, then runs it! That's scary to me and not the way this should be written. Granted it's LAN only, but something that allows you to pass strings to turn into executable code is frightening and not great security.
RoomMe seems really cool, but it looks like they should have talked to someone who knew a bit more about Hubitat when they decided to built an integration. If I end up buying a RoomMe I'd probably write my own integration, this one isn't ideal in my opinion
As I said in my earlier post, I understand the RoomMe API from my work writing the Crestron driver for RoomMe but didn't get to explicitly try their Hubitat driver. I just had seen their announcement that it was now compatible with Hubitat and IFTTT and thought people here would be interested.
You may be absolutely correct that their driver isn't perfect and could be improved upon. Coming from the Crestron world I can say that Hubitat is a very different environment to deal with at times. It doesn't surprise me that someone's first attempt at a driver is less than perfect. However, the open code base to a driver makes it easier for people here to build upon that and make improvements.
I can say that from my experience the product itself works well. The one caveat to that is that you have to be a person, along with other members of your family, that doesn't go anywhere without you phone as it uses Bluetooth connectivity to track you as you move throughout your home. If you are someone who comes into the house after work and puts your phone down on your desk or dresser for the rest of the day then the product isn't going to do anything for you.
Yup, agreed. For me personally I am very interested but I can't buy it until they support Apple Watch for this very reason. Women, in particular, often have clothes that don't have pockets. So my wife rarely has her phone on her. Our watches though would be perfect if they add that support. They said it's on their list but no ETA
