
Bringing Back IRIS by Lowe’s – Arcus Smart Home - andrewx
https://www.wl-net.net/blog/post/bringing-back-iris-lowes-arcus
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vmh1928
Great. former IRIS user. I hadn't heard Lowe's open sourced the code, good for
them. After the IRIS shutdown announcement I switched to the Samsung
Smartthings platform since it supports the second gen IRIS sensors along with
a lot of other home automation products.

I use the system mostly for security and water leak monitoring.

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andrewx
Having spent most of my time on Arcus, it feels like SmartThings and Arcus are
at least conceptually similar. If IRIS had invested more resources into an API
and exposing a lot of the internals, they might have had a chance at
attracting more technical users. For example, the rules engine and device
query system could have been extended to allow more custom automation, and I
suspect they could have built out an other "bridge" to provide an API for
home-build integrations. However, the IRIS team seems to have been to focus on
a relatively small number of things that were exposed to the user, and tried
to get them right. I feel like it's a reasonable platform to built on top of,
but brings a lot of non-trivial complexity.

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jms703
This is great work. Loved reading that you got help from some of the Iris
team.

