Looking for recommendations - wall controller with Intercom feature.
Someone mentioned these in another thread:
Brightswitch is still in development, not released yet. No telling what features it will actually end up with, or what quality it will be.
@w112nxs , can you be more specific about what features you’re looking for and how you would expect it to integrate with smartThings?
And are you looking for a video doorbell, or for something used inside the house?
These days, there are a lot of video baby monitors, a few doorbells, but very few intercoms. It seems like most families just text from their phones if they want to reach someone in another part of the house.
It’s also pretty easy to set up a cheap tablet with Skype on it if you want video calling from one room to another.
There is still some demand for the old-fashioned hardwired button push wall panel and Intercoms in certain kinds of situations. OnQ tends to be one of the highest rated of the less expensive ones in this category, well engineered, looks nice, but does require hardwire between the units. And no integration with SmartThings.
So there’s a lot of Variation in devices depending on your specific use case.
The wink relay was supposed to have an intercom feature. I returned mine before it was added, so I can’t say whether they ever got around to it. It has a very nice form factor.
As I understand it, the feature was never added.
They’re website still claims it as an upcoming feature. Given that it has been nearly a year since I returned mine it’s a good bet it’ll never happen.
Yeah I wouldn’t place any money on it…
It’s been a good amount of time since you asked, but check this out.
Are you by any chance an employee of that company? Or just excited by their preorder marketing?
The product is still in pre-release, their website is very slick marketing but not much real information, and there’s just no way to know what if any SmartThings integration it will have once it’s actually released.
Back when it was first announced at CES 2015 they said it was going to have a $99 year service contract for advanced features. But you can’t tell from the website now whether that’s still true or not.
It may end up being a great product. But until you can actually order it for two day delivery, it’s all just marketing. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.
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Excitement is great. Preorder publicity is intended to get everyone excited. That’s its purpose. But when it comes to integrating with another system, details matter. So it’s helpful to the community to distinguish between prerelease announcements which look like interesting designs and currently available products.
And there’s nothing wrong with being an employee. Employees of a number of different home automation companies participate on this board, and their information is always welcome and helpful. (I believe you yourself may have spoken with one of the skybell employees in one of those threads.)
If you were an employee, I would’ve asked you to get some technical information on the possible integration if you were allowed to publish it. That’s all. Apologies if you read something into the question that I didn’t intend.
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