“I have a terrace house with multiple Vera hubs because of thick brick walls. Vera has been superseded, so it was time to review. Remote control is easy and common. Automations are commonplace, local processing is essential. Total cost of ownership can run out of control with subscription fees. Now I have many smart home devices and several hubs, I need to be able to integrate them and refine the automations. What I didn't realise, before I installed HomeIX, is that many devices can deliver numerous streams of data points - where Vera can get an image from a camera, Home Assistant gets that plus multiple video streams, movement sensors, etc. Where Hue gets simple on/off from a Hue movement sensor, Home Assistant gets that plus a stream of temperature, illuminance, etc. And all those data points can be used for triggers and graphs. Home Assistant is a step up in terms of sophistication - more integrations, vastly improved user interface, much more flexibility, constant updates and the ability to graph all that data in ways that are useful, easy to setup and intuitively understandable. The HomeIX hardware has everything it needs, except over-the-air updates for Z-Wave devices - but I live in hope!!”
“Great little box , at last a Home Assistant hub with built in ZWave and Zigbee, but sadly its a little let down with very low RAM and only a 100Mbps NIC. I woulld have expected more RAM and 1GBps NIC at that price. I did have problem with setup as it wouldnt let me restore an Home Assistant backup , but that was probably more of a Home Assistant issue and not the hub , and TBH it turned out better as it meant I could start with a clean install. Had to manually add approx 45 devices from my previous SmartThings hub , so took a while but easy enough. Moved to HA a while back but the lack of built in Zigbee and Zwave stopped me from ditching Smarthings , so I was please to see this hub was available. One suggestion to Vesternet is to get more visbility on the Home Assistant Community as nobdoy knew what it was when I mentions it , also I did then post a link to it for members.”
“After discovering that Home Assistant offered a greater range of integrations I decided to sell my Hubitat C7 and buy the HOMEIX hub. It worked straight out of the box and seems to have everything you need to integrate all of your smart devices. It even allowed me to connect to Vesternet's Z Wave dimmers that I couldn't connect to Hubitat due to the distance and structures between the hub and the devices. I am only just getting started but I'm already a very happy customer!”
“The product is sold as being easy to set up even for a novice. This is certainly not the case! To use the hub as a HA newby you will struggle unless you do a crash course in HA basics. Perhaps it would be a lot easier if you purchased the various Vesternet add-on courses but this more than doubles the price. It appears to be a well made and reliable piece of kit - however I can only confirm this after I finish HA for Dummies!”
“It a great small device that worked straight out of the box.
For a newbie there is still a lot of learning involved, but the hub takes away most of the tedious stuff so you can get started pretty much straight away.”
“Being new to the home automation world I tried running home assistant on a Rasperry Pi. My inexperience soon showed and I lost all interest. I then purchased Hubitat and was relatively happy as it was intuitive. Months on I was finding it hard to do what I wanted.
I have now tried the Homeix. It was easy to setup and appeared to work straight out of the box, in terms of getting it up and running. The integrated Zwave and Zigbe are a massive bonus, another fiddly thing I didnt need to set up for myself.
However as per most products of this nature, I found it hard to get my head around HA. This is not an issue with Homeix I might add, other than the fact it was so preconfigured, a newbie didn't experience the process and therefore a whole new learning curve begins.
My son is a programmer so spent the time explaining the whole process, this has given me the the confidence to start configuring the unit. Its also made me appreciate how well the Homeix has been put together, both hardware and the knitting together the various components within. I have managed to get all integrations working now and look forward to getting my whole house working together.
Well done for a good, well thought out product.
Maybe some videos for the absolute beginners would be good.
Martin C”
“I was new to HA, switching from SmartThings - not only am I impressed with HA, the simplicity of this unit makes setup much easier than something like Pi. Everything is built in and it seems very reliable during the months I’ve used it. Would highly recommend.”
