QIoT worth using?

QIoT technology to allow you to explore potential IoT business opportunities.
Smart home/Smart building/Smart City/
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garnold
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QIoT worth using?

Post by garnold »

Please, before you suggest that this post is in any way negative towards QNAP, stop. I'm quite new to IoT and setting up a home system. Plus, I'm trying to learn more about this space and industry. IoT seems rather exciting to me and I would like to learn more. I have a QNAP NAS that offers QIoT as an solution and I was about to install it. Before I clicked the install button and figured I would look at how active this forum is to help me gauge if this was a popular solution and something I should use. Well, most of the posts here are rather old and that has me a bit worried. Would sticking with HA be a better path to take? I'm also wondering about this because HA is certainly for the home and QIoT seemed a little more business focused so maybe QIoT would be a good way to go. Just wondering how popular this suite is and if I should go with it? Thank you!
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spile
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by spile »

Looking at the number of posts on this forum is a good metric for judging the popularity of a Qnap product imho.
For IOT apart from QVRPro, I haven’t seen anything to persuade me to further integrate my Qnap.
Most of my projects have been self build using the ESP32 and Raspberry Pi.
Home Assistant and ESPNow have lots of posts on their forums.
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Cadtoon
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Location: Calgary, Alberta

Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by Cadtoon »

I'm like garnold, recently interested in home automation and was thinking maybe I could use the QNAP somehow.
garnold
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by garnold »

I decided to give it a shot and started setting things up this week. I'll let you know how it goes 👍
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Cadtoon
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by Cadtoon »

I decided to go ahead to see what I can find out. I started by installing Home Assistant into my container. The install documentation was good. The first thing I then did was install the HA app on my iPhone. That didn't go s smooth. It tried to detect the QNAP but finally timed out and asked for the IP. Once I got in I noticed it was listing my internal IP as the external IP. I made the corrections, logged out and tried again. Kept giving me an error. Tried removing the app and install again to no avail. I then tried reinstalling the container. Again I could get in but as soon as I logged out, I couldn't get back in. I think I installed about 4 times before I noticed a switch "Allow person to login" in the general/people settings. It defaults to the off position. So now I can login with both my iPhone and in Windows browser.
I found I could add my iPhone in HA but not QNAP. Documentation I followed > https://poyu.co.uk/2020/07/10/setup-hom ... ng-docker/
I ran into trouble when I got to "Add QNAP Sensor". The files it tells me to edit do not exist.
I then moved on to installing QLoT. That installed well. I thought I would try to add a function to notify me when the iPhone battery get low. I can't figure out how to add the phone as a device.
Spent the rest of the day by joining Github and Discord sites. Now my brain hurts.
tomtefan
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by tomtefan »

I´ve been using the Qiot now for a week and it works pretty good. I like it as an easy string up phase.
What I had trouble with is that I cant found out a way to edit the resources file for the "thing" so I cant set the correct units (ampere/volt etc) on my raspberry pi.

The other thing I am struggeling with now is the huge amount of resources qiot takes from my system, roughly 3.5GByte of ram out of my 8GByte.
So I am now thinking about moving to a node red installation outside of the nas to see if that removed some of the mem problems.
If that doesnt work, I´ll install mongo also on the side and remove qiot from my qnap.
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moody_blue
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by moody_blue »

Every home automation system has two fundamental parts:
1) Interfaces to the physical devices
2) Command engine with rules
Even though QIoT integrates node-red, which is "best of breed" for 2) above, it falls short of physical interfaces. Often this is the most complex part in any IoT implementation and having good support is fundamental. That's why I've never considered QIoT at all. Where is the support ???

I'm happy with OpehHAB, it doesn't require containners (unlike Home Assistant). Both tools run in QNAP and have excellent support in their respective forums.
QNAP TS-253A 8G QTS 5.0.1.2145
Plex Media Server 1.29.0.6209
OpenHAB 3.4.0.M2
Unifi 7.2.92
Apache80 2454.8230
GLPI 10.0.3
EPMTek
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Re: QIoT worth using?

Post by EPMTek »

@tomtefan

I have noticed the same - QIoT Suite uses 1GB RAM on my TS-453D even with all IoT applications stopped...

I'd be interested to see your experiences with vanilla Node Red etc. as getting historical data out of QIoT (e.g. to the IoT Historical Widget for display on the dashboard) is proving to be a monumental PITA as it's not very well documented (I can find 1 article on it from the QNAP QIoT site).

I'm tempted to go vanilla and at least there is a wealth of info on Node Red etc. out there. To echo the sentiments of spile and moody_blue above, if the QIoT forum here has little traffic on it and even less QIoT help and examples on QNAP's own site then I think that gives me the answer here at least.

I'm a QNAP fan, but I'm struggling to see what QIoT brings to the party, apart from a simple installation process.
Steve

TS-101, HS-251+, TR-004, TS-453D
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