Dallas, Texas – Indigo Domotics, the leading provider of Mac-based smart home software, announces the immediate availability of Indigo 7, an update to the company’s intelligent smart home server for macOS. With Indigo, users can easily monitor and control lights, appliances, thermostats, locks, lawn sprinklers and dozens of other items found in the home, thereby enhancing comfort, convenience and security while helping to reduce energy usage.
Included in this release is support for over 65 additional Z-Wave devices, including locks, thermostats, sensors, and lighting controllers. These devices represent a broad selection of devices available worldwide from a large number of vendors and brings the total number of supported and tested Z-Wave devices to over 230. Along with this new device support, Indigo now supports Z-Wave Network Wide Inclusion (NWI) for simplification of the inclusion process, encrypted communication to allow direct lock control, and a new network optimization feature to help maintain Z-Wave routing information across the network.
To facilitate faster support of new Z-Wave devices, Indigo 7 now includes low-level plugin hooks for Z-Wave communication. These new APIs allow 3rd party plugins to add Z-Wave specific enhancements, including support for new devices that aren’t yet available in Indigo’s built-in Z-Wave implementation. “The new Z-Wave APIs in Indigo 7 are a huge addition to Indigo’s extensibility framework,” said Peter Howarth, an Indigo plugin developer. “Two of the most popular Z-Wave feature requests on the forums were advanced integration for locks and scene controllers. The new API enabled me to write plugins for both of these features within hours of them being released – a testament to their simplicity and power.”
“Z-Wave is one of the most popular smart home protocols and now, with dozens of new devices supported, including locks, Indigo is a complete Z-Wave platform. Combined with our Insteon and legacy X10 support, we have the broadest range of built-in support for Do-it-Yourself (DIY) smart home protocols among our competitors,” said Matt Bendiksen, CTO and Founder of Indigo Domotics.
Indigo 7 also includes significant improvements to its 3rd party developer APIs and tools, including debugging and integration into popular development IDEs. This has spurred a 30% increase in 3rd party plugins and increased the number of 3rd party Indigo developers. These new plugins support a range of the most popular smart home devices from LIFX, Nest, Philips Hue, and Sonos, to home theater components from Onkyo, Samsung, and Yamaha. Even the Amazon Echo and Harmony Remotes now have integration into Indigo. With these new integrations there are now nearly 200 3rd party plugins available that extend the Indigo ecosystem to different connected devices.
Plugin support isn’t limited to just adding new smart home devices – many plugins extend Indigo in other ways, such as: simplifying logic and scene creation, adding useful data like weather and energy usage, adding virtual devices to simplify and automate complex logic, and expanding on the reporting of data through the various Indigo clients. Indigo 7 is more extendable than ever and the new 3rd party contributions continue to add powerful new functionality and integration to the Indigo platform.
Many of these new plugins were possible because of developer improvements in Indigo 7. “Indigo not only supports the most popular scripting language, Python, but we now offer the best development tools for our plugin developers. With Indigo 7, we directly integrated two standard Python debuggers (pdb and pudb) and added integration with PyCharm, the de facto standard Python IDE with full interactive debugging,” said Mr. Bendiksen. “These tools, taken together with a slew of new APIs and enhanced logging, give developers of Indigo plugins an advantage over other systems in both ease of use and development lifecycle support.”
“We are thrilled to be able to offer our customers a smart home solution that supports the vast majority of Z-Wave lighting, appliance, lock, thermostat, and sensor devices,” said Jay Martin, CEO of Indigo Domotics. “Indigo’s support of Z-Wave and Insteon devices, along with the availability of hundreds of powerful and robust 3rd party plugins tightly integrated into Indigo, makes it a professional quality solution for both smart home DIY customers and commercial integrators worldwide.”
Pricing and Availability:
Indigo 7 is available now for $249.95 (USD) through the Indigo Domotics website. Owners of some previous versions of Indigo are eligible for an upgrade discount. Also available online is a 30 day trial copy of Indigo 7. Indigo runs on macOS 10.7 or greater. Evaluation copy of software available upon request.
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Founded in 2002, Indigo Domotics is the developer of Indigo, an intuitive suite of software and services that make creating the smart home easy. Indigo is the only Mac-based smart home solution that supports Insteon, Z-Wave, and X10 simultaneously and has nearly 200 3rd party plugins that provide support for hundreds of other smart devices, protocols, and services. Indigo Domotics and Indigo are trademarks of Perceptive Automation, LLC. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.