Fibaro Swipe and Vera Plus

Fibaro Swipe and Vera Plus

After attending training for Fibaro products, I left with the impression Fibaro is the future of Z-Wave home automation. We sell many manufacturers and all have solid products, but Fibaro has the Z-Wave user experience in mind. The Swipe is one device that was high on the 'ooooh' list, if you believe the reactions of my classmates.

The Swipe is a hands-free scene controller that uses various hand gestures to trigger events on your Z-Wave gateway. I was happy to get my hands on one, and although I didn't have much confidence that I could recreate the Fibaro demo with my gateways (WINK, Staples Connect, Nexia Bridge and Vera Plus), I would give it a try. The Vera Plus traditionally has been the most universal of my hubs, so that's the focus of this test.

After opening the packaging on the Swipe, I read some instructions and my fears were confirmed; the instructions pointed to a Home Center 2 as the gateway that would give the swipe the most functionality. I am a few months away from getting my hands on a Home Center 2 to demo. But would the Swipe work in some fashion with the Vera?

Swipe; a hands-free Scene controller for the Vera Plus

To include the Swipe in the Vera, there is no profile so I needed to use "Generic Z-Wave".  After putting the Vera into include mode, I initially struggled with the correct gestures to initiate the correct function on the Swipe. To include, you put your hand in the middle of the screen, wait for the ascending tone, then wait for the 2 beeps, then swipe up. It's not intuitive at first, but what you are doing is cycling through a menu. The beeps (almost like little tick sounds from an electronic watch) are very quiet. Even in my office I had some trouble hearing them at first. I went to the lab where I was able to figure out what was going on. One 'beep', then two beeps - SWIPE UP!  It took me 10 tries before I got the hang of it.

After that it was easy. I went back to my office.  I timed out my Vera's inclusion mode a few times while playing, but then I managed to include the Swipe into my IU7. If you leave your Swipe unplugged for a while, then go directly into inclusion or similar, you will hear a wake up beep, THEN the tones, THEN the menu beeps. After 20 minutes of playing I figured it out. I think if the instructions were a little clearer (or if I read them better) I could have cut the setup down to 10. But this was with a non-supported controller. The HC2 shows a lot more of what's going on, according to the instructions.

At first, the Swipe did not respond. I tried configuring and polling, but got mixed results. I excluded then re-included the device, and all was better. I noticed the 'exchanging security keys' and surmised that because I was in the lab (far away) from the Vera hub, I didn't complete the inclusion properly in one of my false starts. After the Swipe was entered into the Vera Plus and got configured, I named it and it looked exactly like any other remote or scene controller.

 

Opening the dialog brought me to a choice of what scenes to associate with which hand gesture.

hink the Swipe functions very well as a hands-free scene controller for my Vera Plus. I am excited to try it with others (including the HC2), but I wanted this blog to debut with the release of this device on Z-waveproducts.

Click to check out a video that shows more.

One feature that should have been first in this blog, is the ability to put a custom photo to replace the stock girl with the hot hands. Maybe something from CEDIA.

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