At a crossroads, stay with CQC?

[jkmonroe]

Another problem on places like Reddit is that the freebirds will down vote anything other than the free products. So any vendor of a commercial product is lucky if his post even stays visible. Many people in that open source community seem to  consider making money evil.

You're right about that.  And I do plug CQC at nearly every turn - IVB and I are likely single-handedly responsible for getting CQC in the conversation over on /r/homeautomation before you showed up.  But it's a very tough road, trying to convince folks who are getting into HA for the very first time to shell out their own cash for software.  So I say let them use HASS (home assistant), but let's take a look at what drivers they use and try to create them so users can have a more seamless path forward.

And isn't Elve a branch off from CQC?  Johnnynine, J9, Elve?

[Dean Roddey]

Supposedly so. He didn't like something about CQC so went off to do his own thing. He didn't realize that the way to make a small fortune in automation is to start with a large one. Eventually reality set in and he did the (probably much more sane) thing and moved on.

[xlurkr]

Back to the OP's question:

I use CQC mostly to tie other things together, rather than driving everything natively, which Dean often mentions as a good reason for using it.  For example, I receently set it up so that when my wife does a "double click On" with the master bathroom light switch (Insteon/ISY) in the morning, it turns on the TV and the master bath zone on the Russound, and tunes the Tivo to her favorite news station (if you have a Tivo, you know that it picks stations for you, seemingly at random).  Double click off turns TV and that Russound zone off, in addition to dousing the light.  No remotes, phones, or tablets necessary.

Another thing it's great for is coupling remotes into your home automation.  I have a URC Complete Control system that's not very versatile, but I created a one-way driver that talks to CQC by sending RS232 commands from the URC base station.  That way an RF wand remote can do anything.  I don't need to rely on URC to make it possible.  I realize that not everyone likes wand remotes anymore, but I do.

I haven't been that interested in making a tablet-driven whole house interface like others have done.  Maybe if I had infinite time.

-Tom

[Dean Roddey]

BTW, you can use the built in trigger driver with anything that sends a serial string, and it's quite flexible as well, and you have a nice interface for the training and such.

[Sendero]

BTW, you can use the built in trigger driver with anything that sends a serial string, and it's quite flexible as well, and you have a nice interface for the training and such.

I think one of the biggest reasons I'm not getting more out of CQC is the lack of my time to develop my setup more. I know CQC's Echo capabilities could allow me to do things such as "ask jarvis to turn on office" and have CQC pick the correct Hue scene based on time of day instead of just "alexa, turn on office lights" and me using Huetro on a PC to pick the scene. But it was just so quick and easy to setup my Echo's to be able to do basics that were good enough for WAF, and that I have a near 2-year old now, that keep me from spending more time on integrating things. 

I use the Ecobee app for my Ecobee 3. There is a CQC driver but not fully supporting/exposing features on the Ecobee 3. 

For the Echo I have skills for the Ecobee, Logitech Harmony Elite, Firebox thermometer (i love smoking meats), and ISY-994 controller through ISY Portal

We have a Ring on the front door and since their setup is so closed up we have to use their App (or an Echo Show, but I'm not buying one of those)

For my media room, I had grand ideas of creating movie 'scene's that would turn on projector & stereo, lower the IR controlled room darkening blinds, and dim the lights to movie watching levels. But I haven't gotten around to doing that due to time involved. And the need to run more wires to get an IR repeater that can reach the blinds' receiver. And the fact we used an inflatable 5x7 pool to create a ball pit in there for my son

Right now the main thing I get from CQC is triggering lights on and auto-off using my Insteon and Elk motion sensors. We no longer use my Dell Venue 8 Tablets since most of what we care about is done via voice control. 

I can see there being value in CQC. I can also see I'm not leveraging even 5% of it at present.

[monetteboy]

I wish there was better native iOS support.  I know the webriva is the new thing but I honestly haven't had time to use it as I can't seem to find the magic combo to get it to render my current riva screens the same...safari lets me pinch to zoom, chrome doesn't, running it from the home screen as a shortcut doesn't.  I don't have time to redo all my screens to make it work.  Not to mention that it seems like every device has a different resolution so I haven't looked on how to tackle that with ease.

Another reason I find myself using the native apps for my sonos/hue/ecobee/etc is that they allow me to use widgets to fire off scenes or check temps, 3D touch, push notifications...I can sit in my hot tub and use my apple watch to control my deck lights and music.  

So I'm like what other people have posted...I'm only using a small fraction that CQC has to offer (lights schedules for my non hue, control the elk, behind the scenes stuff).

I know there's only so much time and money to invest in something but I feel like there's a general undertone that iOS/Android is too limiting and supporting them with native functions is going to be way down the line if ever.  

Just my .02 cents.

[Dean Roddey]

You should be able to add this:

&nopixelscale=yes

to the URL. That should cause it to suppress the normal scaling that phones tend to do, and show at their normal resolution. If you want to get some other resolutions, there is a template scaling feature. Though, to make that work, you have to be sure to use relative template paths when you load new templates (base template, into overlays, or popups.) That way, when it scales the templates and writes them out to a new place, they are referencing the scaled ones, not the original ones. The latest version makes it pretty easy to do relative paths.

If that doesn't work, start a thread and we can dig deeper. Other folks are using it on iOS very successfully, so it can be done.

[Dean Roddey]

The value of our Echo stuff is that it's not limited to just one command doing one thing. You can run CQC actions that do whatever you want them to do. So you can go into watch movies mode with one command. And also it provides the ability to do quite extensive queries for status information and such.

As long as folks don't want more than effectively a remote control (whether it be done via a watch or phone or speech) where you 'press a button' and this one thing changes, and they don't mind having the virtual equivalent of a table full of them to have to pick up and put back down again to do more than one thing, then of course an automation system has much more limited value to them. CQC's power is in the integration of things, and of course other bits like triggered and scheduled activities.

[IVB]

Sendero, i'm traveling a huge amount right now, so much so that I got an apartment near the client site. I have an ISY there, but TBH I really really miss CQC. The act of manually doing stuff is just painful, and Tasker/ISY isn't cutting it. Unfortunately due to the gig, I just don't have time to setup CQC in that location.

Once the travel stops, hopefully early Q2, I want to play with CQC Voice. I know TONS of people as a result of my bitcoin/crypto addiction who refuse to use an Echo, if I can get local voice control working it would really take off in that crowd.

[Dean Roddey]

So are you a bitcoin billionaire now? If I had any I'd be selling it as fast as possible and happily pocketing the profits. Maybe the internet bubble scarred me, but I figure beware fortune bearing gifts, find a chair before the music ends, etc...

So, when an off the official books currency like that goes way up, do you owe taxes on your virtual earnings? Or is it just all in the shadows?