Buddasworld

Fibaro Home Centre 2 - Hardware first impressions

I’ve just taken delivery of the recently released Fibaro Home Centre 2 home automation controller. There hasn’t been much about the system on-line yet as, from what i’ve read, hardware supply is short since its release at the back end of February 2012.

So for reference i thought i’d document a bit about the kit supplied in the UK by Vesternet.

The packaging is a sturdy cardboard with a matt printed colour design on the outside. The outer box appears to have taken a couple of knocks at some point in its travels but the dents haven’t penetrated the box internals.

Inside reveals a full colour thank you note which covers the 5 steps to getting started. All seems straight forward enough, just be ready with a screw driver to remove the side panel to connect up the cables!

The aluminium Home Centre 2 box is not wrapped in any protective cover or bagged, which I thought was unusual. The cardboard inlay has been rubbing on the aluminium and left marks which can be removed with a polish.

Accessories in the box include a white ethernet cable for hooking the HC2 box up to your local network, and a power supply.

Fibaro are based in Poland so the boxed power supply has a European plug on it. The UK supplier provided a 2->3 pin adapter, but it is worth noting that the PSU can accept a normal UK cable that uses the same 3 circle connector (not sure what the correct technical term is for it) - see photo below. On a side note I also noticed the power supply is labeled for an LCD monitor.

The main unit hardware has very little on the outside to play with.

What you can see are:

• A Z-Wave antenna on the rear very much like a traditional WiFi access point.
• On the rear are two aluminium buttons - for power and a dual use button for emergency recovery of the software and to put the box in to “learning mode” when adding a new Z-Wave device.

Unscrewing the side panel reveals a number of recognisable ports. From left to right there’s the power, 2 x USB ports - one containing the recovery boot software on a USB stick, RJ45 Ethernet and stereo audio out (I assume).

What you may notice in the photo above is an aluminium block blanking plate between the power and USB ports. Unscrewing this revealed two additional ports which you should all recognise: SVGA and DVI monitor outputs. As I’ve only got an iMac to hand I can’t quickly plug in and see what the Home Centre 2 is outputting on either of the display connectors.

Upon powering up the device you get a short test array of flashing blue LEDs displayed along the front to indicate the various states of the box. 

From right to left the LEDs indicate: power, LAN, Internet connection, Z-Wave, Learn Mode state, Recovery mode, Software update available, Software update in progress.

Once the box has booted and connected to your LAN just three LEDs remain on. As it was the first time it had been powered on the Software update download indicator began blinking.

I felt the supplied set-up instructions left the actual getting connected to the admin control panel a bit vague and un-finished. The instructions talk about assigning a static IP or using your networks DHCP (the usual method). However if the HC2 does get given an IP address via your broadband routers DHCP how will you know how to access the admin control panel?

Luckily visiting the Fibaro support pages provide a quick link to a “HC2 Finder” app for Windows and OSX. The app is quick, simple, well presented, and gave the info needed to get started.

Connecting to the box displayed a really nice control panel design. The software installed on my box was v1.009 and v1.024 was awaiting download.

During the download a timer counts up, and at the end the timer vanishes but no further instructions appear about what to do next. Closing the dialog and refreshing the page showed the new software version was now installed. This may be because my initial system had an early beta of the software installed.

It’s worth noting that the HC2 will not execute any operations or accept connections from controls such as iOS devices whilst an update is being downloaded and installed. The dialog box suggests the Home Centre 2 box will be out of action for approximately 10 minutes.

Personally I think the downloads should be downloaded in the background and await action from the control panel administrator to just install - rather than taking the whole box out of action to do the download.

Well that’s it for the hardware. The control panel software can be seen in action in the official video from Fibaro. I’m off to find out what I can control first in my home!