Recent content by Dean Roddey

Elan and Control4 are not the same sorts of things. The Elk and Omni are automation panels with integrated security. Control4 is an automation system to which you'd still need to add lighting and security subsystems to. I know less about Elan but I'm fairly sure they are similar.

I got an e-mail the other day informing me that Google had purchased the rights to me and was phasing me out.

Yeh, that's the gotcha. Otherwise it would be a fine choice. At this point, I would go with Lutron's Radio RA2 for the core stuff. It is correct that it's better to have a single, coherent system for core stuff. It's designed to work as a system, and will be far easier to integrate. There's...

No, CQC is just a client in this scenario. So it just subscribes to topics on external MQTT servers. So it's just interested in getting information, it doesn't act as an MQTT server itself. A lot of folks these days are probably likely to use some cloud based server, as unfortunate as I think...

We are about to do our 5.4 release of CQC, which now includes support MQTT (as a client.) So there is now an MQTT driver and you can configure CQC to associate driver fields with specific topics, tell it how to interpret payload data, and how to convert to/from the CQC field representations of...

It's hard to really understand the real reasoning behind this. I mean:   1. The Omni is (or was) targeting primarily professionals, and though some adventurous DIYers installed them, that couldn't have been more than a small bit of their sales I would think. 2. None of the stuff they offer up in...

I wouldn't read too much into that. Things like the Elk aren't like IoTs widgets. They have serious liability issues and such. Unless they have had serious outstanding issue in that time and haven't fixed them, then it may not mean much. If there's nothing broke, with these types of mission...

In a real automation solution you would do that via the automation controller, where you can keep it on one place and not spread out so that you lose it if you have to replace a switch or something. And of course the other advantage is that the automation controller can work across devices from...

Was this officially announced somewhere or something?

I have such a thing, but it's specific to CQC so not of use to you. It's not terribly hard to create one really if you don't find a canned one that does what you need. Very few things require any significant twiddling of control lines, so you could leave that out pretty safely probably, and just...

That might be one no-hub implementation, and probably the worst of all of course.

Without a central controller you aren't really doing automation. You are doing basic control with some very simple extras that could be charitably called automation, but not really. In order to have a real automation system you need something that is in control of everything and watching the...

The ISY actually is the hub in that case. It just has the hardware built it (or optionally addable.) That's got its pros and cons. If it's built it, then you are tying the lifetime of the controller to the lifetime of that particular iteration of the communications standard. Z-Wave, for...

  A lot of these folks are just newbies who think that Wifi is how everything should connect to an automation system because they have no clue what the real issues are. It's a very good thing that things like Zigbee have their own separate network.

You can of course trigger on changes in the Elk arming state and such-like.