My home automation goals are pretty modest. All I want to be able to do is to be able to turn all the lights on in the parts of the house that are in use and turn them off again when they are not in use. and to be able to do this without paying someone else a perpetual rent for the privilege.
Deployment of connected devices has currently stalled pending a solution to the control hub issue described below.
I started deploying devices in the belief that I would be able to use my Revolv hub to control them all from a single console. This was not a good move.
From the start the Revolv has been a work in progress. Then Google/Nest bought the company and shut down development the next day. As a result, I can't use the Revolv to control the 6 way dimmer switches that were intended to be the principal control point for the system.
The Revolv unit is still functional and it seems likely that Google will continue to provide whatever cloud services are necessary to make it work for an indefinite period. But that still leaves the fact that the functionality supported is very limited:
At the moment there is no acceptable alternative. Each vendor sells a control hub that supports their devices and no others. That is not an acceptable solution as there is an abundant likelihood that 8 out of 10 of the current manufacturers of home automation equipment will fold in the next five years.
Many of the hubs require a monthly subscription which is an automatic disqualifier for me. The razor and blades business model sounds great in business school but it is almost always a lousy deal for customer. In this case I am being asked to lay out the capital cost of installing the devices and pay for the hub and then they expect a monthly fee on top.
Update: I have since purchased a Universal Devices Home Automation Controller which does some but not all of what I want to do. More in due course.