Hey all. I'm having Apple envy. A buddy of mine was visiting this weekend, and he showed me the Home app on his iPhone. I was impressed with the layout and design (naturally, it looked very pretty), and I particularly liked how it handled scene creation. There were some minor UI things that bugged me, and there's some automations that aren't possible (yet) that I can do with my system, but overall it got me VERY tempted to migrate to that system, which would even mean switching to the dark side and getting an iPhone. That's how much I like my home automation!

Does anyone here use Homekit? Tom, I assume you have at least a few devices. What kind of setup do you have? I'm very interested in how you all are using it.

After a bunch of research into the platform, I've noticed several obstacles to implementing it into my own home. The primary one is that there is absolutely no migration path from a 100% ZWave-based system to a Homekit system. Homekit doesn't talk to any of the ZWave controllers because they don't have the authentication chip in them. Hopefully there'll be some sort of change in that today, but for now it means an outlay of several thousand dollars to replace all the devices we currently have.

The other problem is the size of our current network. I've felt for a while now that modern home automation solutions are designed by and for San Francisco apartment dwellers My research seems to support this idea. The two lighting solutions for Homekit are Lutron Caseta (light switches and lamp modules), and Hue bulbs. I can't put Hue everywhere because I'd go over the 50 device limit by, I don't know, about 300 bulbs. Lutron gets me closer, but only for light switches (I have about 35 switches now and want to add more). Or, I can get some of the new iDevices switches and lamp modules which presumably wouldn't have as much of a limit, but cost twice as much.

So yeah I'll be checking on the announcements today. Hopefully there will be some solution for us old ZWave people.