Quote:
Originally Posted by
progprog 
That's very helpful info, jsharpe- thanks for bringing it to light. So just to be clear: even though Nevo still claims that the z-wave is
not opened up to non-Nevo devices yet, there are definitely some Leviton devices with which it has a fully-functional z-wave connection? (As opposed to wired from the NevoConnect.)
That is correct. I can take an S70 into a room with multiple Z-wave wall switches, dimmers and modules and when I navigate to the Z-Wave screen on the device they all are directly detected and show up in a list. I can then pick one and interact with it from the S70 as expected. This tells me that UEI did indeed implement the standard z-wave communication protocol.
What's currently missing is bringing that information back into Studio-Pro as part of the Nevo Ecosystem to do things like give friendly names to the switches, define scenes/actions and hopefully more advanced activities such as optimize the network. Regarding that last item, I spent some time talking to the folks at Leviton and ControlThink in the z-wave booth at CEDIA and they were actually using an S70 to demonstrate how someone could control a number of different z-wave devices. In fact it was their demo of Studio-Pro that convinced me to give the S70 a try. At the time I didn't realize that this was as yet unreleased functionality for the Nevo. They went on to describe how the S70 could be used to add devices to a z-wave network which was then exported to the ControlThink software, analyzed and optimized there, and then returned to the Nevo ecosystem which would then take advantage of the optimized routing (unlike the Monster AVL-300 which I had been using and supposedly will never have that capability).
I hope to get much more information on this topic at CES in January, assuming all my questions haven't already been answered with the updated software. One thing that the folks from ControlThink stressed was the distinction between a true z-wave scene and what most remotes currently support which is macros. As they described it, the difference lies in the parallelism of the result with a macro being a sequence of events whereas in a scene all the things could happen simultaneously. For example when I select a particular lighting combination on the Monster I get the "popcorn" effect of each of the lights coming on one at a time, which is OK, but certainly not very slick. With full support of true scenes all the lights would switch or dim simultaneously (or as close to that as the network will allow). Apparently UEI had previously not been aware of the additional value of supporting true scenes in addition to macros, but were being lobbied to add that capability.
