HomeSeer does. Via their Z-flash utility.
Right. But that would be providing those updates to end users... which they said they don't do.
You're right. I think Jasco avoids releasing updates, but it's always been a catch-22. They say they don't release them to end users, only vendors. But no vendors (until apparently Hubitat soon?) provide Zwave OTA updates.
So... it's mainly the question of if HE would be willing to reach out to Jasco and see if we can at least call their "bluff".
Jasco’s product certification pages at z-wavealliance.org say “Firmware Updatable: Updatable by Consumer by RF”.
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The one assumption here that there are actually various firmware updates for a particular device. They CAN be updated in theory, but if there isn't an update available, that does no good. Maybe the firmware is only good for a particular chip or circuit board or whatever. I don't think there has been enough research in this area to catalog all of (Jasco's in this case) part numbers and corresponding firmwares.
If someone was creative, they would find a way to do a firmware dump, revise things, and provide that "hacked" firmware to others. This is an extremely common way to do things for many devices like automotive engine control modules, phones, and similar. I am actually surprised nobody has done this for Zwave or Zigbee too. A light switch cannot be anywhere near as complicated as even a phone.
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From what I can tell, VERY few manufacturers have released zwave firmwares because it's traditionally not been needed. So unless someone leaked the firmwares from the zwave alliance, or from the manufacturer, it seems unlikely we'd get anything but compiled code.
I haven't done any serious digging into devices, so I have no idea how easy they would be to either dump the firmware, or to unbrick if you tried to push a hacked firmware to them. =/
I wish Fibaro would release firmware updates to vendors.. They want everyone to have one of their hubs.
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Yep, i have a light hub just for it 
. It's a awful hub!
if people are willing to cover the postage i would be willing to upgrade there items if needed.
Just wondering... Will there be a Hubitat live event to highlight the updates/features in FW 2.2.5?
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I’ve been playing with Home Remote recently in my quest to build an interface that has more polish. With the lengths folks are going to, to improve the native dashboarding capability and some of the admittedly creative, yet elaborate, solutions people come up with - there is already a time investment needed if you want an interface that doesn’t look like a DIY solution on your wall.
Home Remote gives you immense flexibility and a desktop based WYSIWYG designer that although does come with a learning curve is immensely powerful and has various OOB integrations such as Sonos. It’s local and more performant than the native dashboards even on old hardware. I’ve just repurposed a first gen iPad mini that struggles with running stock apple apps - it works fine with Home Remote!
The only thing that is now restricting what can be created for me is a lack of design skill on my part ! but the software doesn’t constrain you; I’ve yet to find something I couldn’t achieve in Home Remote. You can see my first efforts in the post below.. I intend to share the project files once I’ve got the basics working as a sort of “template” and I’m sure someone with more design UX/UI skill than me can add some polish ...
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Didn’t the Live show mention ActionTiles coming to Hubitat? Any update on that?
lol. They didn’t. There was briefly a shot of the app in the list, but they specifically were like “nope. You didn’t see that”. Lol.
That said. Everyone knows it’s coming. I believe we assume in next version.
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Yup. Also ....
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I'm looking forward to the chromecast fixes... I know I saw it in a post somewhere that they were going to resolve the dropped connections...that will be nice.
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I was a big supporter moving from smartthings and recall “the” post that was deleted - drama!
Being a creature of comfort I replicated the colour scheme of the slate skin on my hubitat dashboards - but beyond colour scheme/ icon preferences we already have the easy to use, paid for cloud dashboard solution - sharptools.
What does actiontiles bring to the table that differentiates itself ? Choice / competition is of course good, so maybe that’s enough; but does actiontiles bring anything new to the table? Has it evolved in any way over the last few years? Or is it still the tile row on row interface ?
One of the biggest drawbacks of DIY home automation in my opinion are the limited well designed solutions we have to physically interact with. Whether that’s retrofit smart bulb controls stuck to walls next to existing light switches; or the peculiar remotes that have symbols on them that mean nothing but do resemble spaceship controls from a low budget sci-fi film; through to the limited dashboard solutions available.
What is missing are elegant and well designed ways to interact with our automation systems; with all the innovation in DIY home automation; this is more often than not overlooked. Not suggesting it’s an easy problem to solve but this is where we desperately need some innovation..
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This is where we need some experienced, trained UI designers, not some hardware and software engineers who do UI design as an afterthought. Good UI design needs to be part of the process from the start. It’s the only way to end up with “just works” interfaces that only expose what is needed and controls that interact with hardware and software systems in an intuitive way.
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couldn’t agree with this more - very well put
food for thought. If hubitat wants to get some amazingly (and cheap) UI designers on a contract basis i can hook you up with a couple of companies who do this type of work in eastern europe. For a project at work i built advanced data pipelines for processing of real time data with a visual layout of processing elements for the data explorer. We spent tiny amounts of money (think well under $10K) for a really amazing design with drag and drop and a modern element style design that we plugged our object model into.
Happy to facilitate a contact. The ones we used where in ukraine if i recall (one of the russian speaking tech leads on my team at the time managed that interaction). Totally worth the money and i didn't have to go an hire UI people. It helps a lot if you are clear with your design intent to the contractors though, they will iterate but knowing what you want is essential.
I should share that i am not on the contract programmer business. i just used gui team to contract for me. i have no financial or otherwise tie in with that industry besides having had a good experience.
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I don't know where UI is in the list of things to do. I would suspect not near the top. I'm not sure it's mainsteam enough to warrant the cost.
I hope that a refresh of the UI is "on the list".
Of course, we all understand that UI is something of less importance than "getting everything working", but I hope that we are rapidly coming to the time when things are settling down, and there are small innovations, not LARGE ones. In that kind of environment, a better UI should be closer to the top than to the bottom of the list.
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