This is coming from the perspective of someone who could never put something together like this myself, or even a really weak approximation of it.
But I would be surprised to learn that someone could develop something that’s self-contained on their LAN (as much as that’s possible) and provides all the features that AT does.
Having said that, I haven’t really looked at @kewashi’s dashboard app since it was in alpha stage.
But given that my ST hub is cloud-dependent anyway (along with my Blink cam, and wemo humidifier, and lutron caseta switches, and… you get my drift), having an additional remote server in the mix is well worth the additional feature set that I now have with AT.
Of course there are non-cloud alternatives to each of those products. They require some work on your part (just like the Action Tiles replacement you’re proposing), and don’t have as much vendor’ 3rd party or community support as the Amazon/Samsung products (though a lot more than your homemade ST interface will have)…but they definitely exist.
I was adding a few devices to my device list, and I happened to notice that I can now add my rooms (From the Rooms Manager SmartApp) to Actiontiles. It looks like a “switch” (ON/OFF) right now. Is there a way to get it to show occupied, vacant, etc?
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
1228
No.
…
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
1229
The “JGGDEV” (http://jggdev.com) weather, news, calendar Media Tile generators have been licensed by Thingterfaces LP for ActionTiles and moved to our cloud.
You may want to look into Universal Device Type Translator to map the value of the switch to a presence sensor. In your case, present/not present would be more appropriate than on/off.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
1232
ActionTiles is unable to read the video streams through SmartThings Video Camera “Things”, since SmartThings does NOT offer an API into the video streams and storage.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
1239
Exactly our current recommendation.
It’s just a tad frustrating to customers because they have a “perfectly sufficient” transcoder already in their homes in the form of the SmartThings Hub V2. But, alas, cameras are not an “open” object in the ST world.
Trying this out for the first time, as a front end for my family to be able to access. Right now, I have the three rooms in my house as panels (living room, and two kids’ rooms.) I saved each panel url to my android home screen, so I could access each room. However, it would be easier to have a “House” panel, and the three panels accessible under that panel, so I could look between rooms quickly, or perhaps swipe between panels?. As it is now, I have to close whichever screen I’m on, and click on the icon for another room.
[EDIT] Is it the “Shortcuts”? I just found this, and am looking at that now…
[EDIT] Ok, just made a Curry Home panel, and have tiles sets in there. Would be nice to be able to put blank spacers or something. I ended up putting both kids under KIDS’ ROOMS, so that their four combined lights would make a nice row straight across.
That’s flippin’ awesome. That’s pretty much the kind of layout I was looking for: rooms and sections under different headings, kinda like directories and subdirectories. Just can’t figure out how to do it.
Well, a friend of mine, simply built a website using java, css, and frames… And we linked to actiontiles, dakboard, my cameras, and I built a weather and traffic site to link to as well.
Well, your friend certainly needs to become our friend and share his website…
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
1247
This is an interesting hybrid approach… Thanks for sharing.
The “rendering” code of ActionTiles actually is a single page download and runs entirely in the browser.
While our architecture is super efficient and the latest trend, there’s some stuff that still works best running on a back-end server… Quite often in PHP.
With the desired customized look & feel and modules nearly entirely hand and hard coded, and running on one’s own virtual or home server, the flexibility and power is limitless.
To offer this to the masses, however, ActionTiles would essentially need to build a CMS (content management system) like WordPress. Come to think of it, this probably could actually be implemented in the WordPress framework using sufficiently clever Themes and Plugins.
Keep in mind that such high quality and flexible WP Themes tend to be priced at average $79/year plus hosting.