Web Power Switch Pro Model

This thing is awesome for custom control and logic. The user experience/interface is designed by engineers - meaning its not full of animations and perfectly beveled corners for browser buttons.But its designed by engineers. It works perfectly and has almost exactly what I would have built into it myself if I were trying to marry an Arduino with It has a fully featured RESTy API to remotely control >anything< the device allows. But its really awesome feature is that it allows you to customize pretty much every aspect of the device using Lua script.I have used these devices to fully manage the daily car of my carnivorous plant garden. Using lua various outlets turn on based on sunrise or sunset to simulate standard daylight ramp up/down, as well as irrigation, fountain and filter pumps for water.You can even extend the provided API to some extent for custom controls or triggers for custom logic running in Lua. I've had several Lua threads running across multiple of these devices for over 6 months with no issues. The only thing that takes it down is when the main power fails, and then when the power comes back its set to just resume the appropriate switch state and go on.The only downsides - for me - are that it is not in any way designed to be water/dust proof - which is not unexpected as it is a bunch of outlets and needs cooling but would have been nice if it was potentially a little more intrusion resistent.Would by more, but the new model uses membrane buttons and where mine are mounted I can't see the buttons - I can navigate by feel on the one I have, but new models have nothing to feel for the buttons. This will help with dust/water intrusion though.

Had one issue that I needed to contact support about. I am glad I did. Sergei was awesome. I thought for sure that I would need to RMA the machine, but Sergei knew his product and I was able to recover. Details at the end.Quite frankly, I expected this product to be "cheap Chinese crap". There were cheaper products, so I opted for this one because it had an on-device LCD so that I could configure it locally.This Web Power Switch was NOT cheap. It is AS ENTERPRISE as anything I've used in large data centers. I love the build of this device. It is basically a proper Linux machine with quality EE switching materials. The features list is impressive. It is almost as if this company took EVERY feature request and implemented it into their software/firmware.My issue that required tech support (google web spiders, please index this!):Naturally, when I received the device, the first thing I did after changing the default admin password was update the software and firmware on the device to the latest stable version from the manufacturer.So, I updated from 1.4.something to 1.7.7. All went fine. I then configured the device to my liking and then used the "locking bits" to lock down the device such that you would need physical access to the switch in order to change any setting. Nice feature! The problem came when I forgot to open up the api access to my router, so I had to clear the locking bits. Unfortunately, the reset button did not clear the lock bits as the documentation promised. So, I had a functioning device, but it was locked into a certain state.I tried and tried for 2 days. I always assume my own stupidity first, so I read and re-read all the docs. I then contacted their support by email on a Friday night. I did not get an answer until Monday morning, but I did not expect one over the weekend.Sergei was extremely responsive and helped me telnet into the machine (I know, telnet? what is this 1995? <- joke) after rapidly pressing the reset button. He then told me the commands to put the device into a maintenance state. Strangely, the advice was then to re-flash the same firmware. It, indeed, worked. Sergei was forth-coming about this being an issue and will be repaired in the next version.The device is working flawlessly and I've forgotten its doing its thing in my server cabinet. I use it to reboot my extremely crappy Comcast cable service modem when the service goes out several times per week. This switch does the job well and allows me to be very specific regarding the terms of the reboot. It also has a wifi chip that can act as gateway (meaning device connect to its SSID) or supplicant mode where the switch connects as a client to your existing wifi gateway. I love this. I set the switch to act as a wifi gateway because I want to pull out my phone, connect the phone's wifi device to the switch's SSID and then proceed to operate the outlets. The reason is that if the main wifi gateway is offline or needs to be power-cycled, I won't be able to access the switch because it is a client of the device that needs rebooting.

Works great happy with it. Took a bit to get setup but I am not the most tech savvy person

This is a good product, but not for the faint of heart. It will probably do what you're considering it for, but even if you have a PhD and a MSCS and extensive Linux experience, you're absolutely going to struggle with the user interface. The documentation is pretty horrid too. It took me about 4 hours to finally get it working correctly. One of which was expended updating the firmware because it's not just download a file, upload it, and reboot (that would be way too easy).So why 5 Stars you might ask? Well because I can tell this is a very well physically engineered product and that the software is just trying to accommodate every conceivable customer request/option, and if I'd rated it 3 or 4 stars no one would read this and they might buy something else (which would be wrong). I've purchased two different other devices to do this job, and both failed after a few weeks in the field in the worst possible way; relay off. They were both inexpensive until I factored in the expenses of having to travel 1000 miles to remove them.The software is built on top of OpenWrt. For me that's good because I've written software for this OS before and understand how it thinks. I did not alter this device's software at all, but it's nice to know that I could extend its capabilities / role if I want to. It also gave me the ability to dig in and figure out why the WiFi network setup was failing after I'd tried to set it up via the web menus.I think if the company hired a usability engineer to overhaul the UI experience they'd sell a whole lot more of these, and they'd get a lot fewer negative reviews.