Like I mentioned before, my old GE XT alarm system is getting pretty old - a lot of things don't work right with it and it's sort of flaky anyway. As an alarm it's awesome but the Z Wave seems a bit challenged.
I did some research and found what seems to be the best deal for somebody who doesn't want to futz around with Raspberry Pi and doing everything themselves: SmartThings hub.
It's cheap, works okay, and does a pretty good job. Like everything else though, there's a downside.
It's all cloud-based, so everything ends up being processed on their AWS instance. Normally this is awesome - everything works the same everywhere and it's all good. I have found so far though that the back end will sometimes (and judging by the support log, pretty often), suffer rolling capacity problems as all of the millions of devices being controlled turn on or off. After I got my hub, I thought it was broken for hours just because the service was busy enough nothing seemed to be happening.
Once it settled down though, it's working pretty well. Everything needs to be done from the Android/iOS app for basic operations. It's pretty simple - you turn on the Z Wave and hit 'add' on the app and it finds it. My Hue hub worked just as easily. Being a group of nerds though - this is too boring. Which is why SmartThings has...
An IDE. There's a built-in support for Groovy, which is an unlovable version of the Pascal of the new millennium, Java. It's easy to write and pretty much anyone who managed to slog through a high school computer science course in the past 10 years can write it easily. So you can make a 'driver' for any random device that you happen to have, and as long as the SmartThings AWS or the local box can talk to your device or gadget somehow, you are good. Which is really nice - and if you have some hardware ability you could make all sorts of crazy crap. Anything that can talk REST can be plugged in, so you could make an automated dog house or whatever you want and it will just plug in, and you can share the code with everyone,
Judging by the forums, there's a big group of people making all sorts of gadgets that plug into this API. Seems like a good buy so far - but as always I'll complain bitterly if things start to look otherwise. :-)
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