Frustrated with home automation software
- Thread starter Deane Johnson
- Start date
pete_c
Guru
@Mike,
Its starts slow. Then a build up of the automation crescendo. Before you know it; you will have been bitten by the automation bug.
Once bitten; you will not go back; you will only want more (well a euphoria).
My very electronic kit was a code only 50 watt transmitter was a knight kit in the 1960's. It was a simple square box. My first official shortwave radio was a knight kit. I then was given an old Hallicrafter SW radio and a Hammerlund HQ-150. I remember having to wait until the tubes got warm enough to use the radio and wait to sync the time / frequency on it. I built a radio shack under neath the front porch of the house. You could not stand up in the room. I built a wooden bench around the edges.
I compare this now to playing with an SDR radio the size of a USB stick today; wow neato stuff. Well too having a "plastic" computer in the early 1960's. There was no electricity flowing; it was all little plastic switches and such.
I am curious about Dean's/Deane stuff relating to the Leviton VRCOP. I have been using the Leviton serial Z-Wave PIM with my Leviton HAI OPII panel for quite a while only for Z-Wave switches. Thinking its first or second generation. It does work fine.
Dean; I am impressed and envious relating to the the "fire" and passion you are showing us with CQC.
These days I do not see that type of drive much (well I don't see it much)
Its starts slow. Then a build up of the automation crescendo. Before you know it; you will have been bitten by the automation bug.
Once bitten; you will not go back; you will only want more (well a euphoria).
My very electronic kit was a code only 50 watt transmitter was a knight kit in the 1960's. It was a simple square box. My first official shortwave radio was a knight kit. I then was given an old Hallicrafter SW radio and a Hammerlund HQ-150. I remember having to wait until the tubes got warm enough to use the radio and wait to sync the time / frequency on it. I built a radio shack under neath the front porch of the house. You could not stand up in the room. I built a wooden bench around the edges.
I compare this now to playing with an SDR radio the size of a USB stick today; wow neato stuff. Well too having a "plastic" computer in the early 1960's. There was no electricity flowing; it was all little plastic switches and such.
I am curious about Dean's/Deane stuff relating to the Leviton VRCOP. I have been using the Leviton serial Z-Wave PIM with my Leviton HAI OPII panel for quite a while only for Z-Wave switches. Thinking its first or second generation. It does work fine.
Dean; I am impressed and envious relating to the the "fire" and passion you are showing us with CQC.
These days I do not see that type of drive much (well I don't see it much)
Deane Johnson
Active Member
It is certainly possible that replacing the VRC0P won't cure the problem and we'll be back to square one, but at this point substituting the module is the only way to go. Dean is curious as to why it works with Elve and not CQC, but I'm thinking the Elve driver is probably very old and who knows what's in it. If the new module does the same as the old, we're in for some fun times.
I am "only" 40 so I few of your nostalgia items were just before my time...but...
I still remember my mothers face when she walked into the dining room and I had taken apart two old 286 machines to put the best parts of each back together into one better machine. I was 15. And did it just so I could get Mechwarrior by Acitivision working. I figured it couldn't be THAT hard!
She told me years later she about had a heart attack and turned around and walked away before she started screaming at me.
Man I played that game for hours and hours...
I still remember my mothers face when she walked into the dining room and I had taken apart two old 286 machines to put the best parts of each back together into one better machine. I was 15. And did it just so I could get Mechwarrior by Acitivision working. I figured it couldn't be THAT hard!
She told me years later she about had a heart attack and turned around and walked away before she started screaming at me.
Man I played that game for hours and hours...
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
Bal said:
I've probably told this story before, but never let redundancy get in the way of a good story I say...
Back when I was first starting out, I worked for a branch of GE that did military software systems development. It was all based on VMS and VAX based machines (another nostalgia point in itself I guess, though I don't miss them.) I was just a tape backup guy who came in around noon, did some maintenance stuff and worked over until late after everyone was gone and did all of the backups.
My boss told me one night before he left, we have a big presentation tomorrow, so before you leave I want to shut down those to machines over there and remove the drives. I had no clue that they had very early versions of removable hard drives, though they were in fact compact tapes. He was telling me to shut it down and eject the tape cartridges, so that they could come in in the morning and put the test tapes in and be ready for the demo.
But, not knowing this, I tore them apart and physically took the drives out of them and laid them all of the parts out on the floor in front of them nice and neatly. So they come in the morning with the military brass, ready to run a demo, and the machines are taken apart.
It was one of those, never ass-ume anything, like how intelligent your tape backup guy is.
And, since we've gone completely OT, another one from that era... I was there one night, and this was later and we'd sucked a whole lot more cash from the military teat and had some quite large machines in the machine room by then. It was all on the usual raised floor with cables underneath, and also water sensors. I ate my supper and sat the remains down in a box I was going to take to the dumpster later. Somehow it tipped over and a little bit of water leaked through the tiles and must have been right on top of a water sensor and the entire complex did an emergency shutdown.
So, I go to call my boss, dreading the call but I had to do it so I could get the system back up. His name was Charlie Pope. I called information and called the number. He apparently answered and I said this is Dean, I'm having a big problem here. And he's talking to me like he clearly knows me, but something isn't right and I can't figure it out. It turned out that I'd reached Charlie Poppe, who had been someone who worked with my father over a decade before who happened to be living nearby all that time later. Back then I'd been going through a rough time (the usual late teen psychodrama stuff), so he thinks I'm making some desperation call to him in the middle of the night about a big problem I'm having, and I think I'm talking to my boss about a problem with the computers. It was really weird.
NeverDie
Senior Member
+1ano said:
At the very least, there needs to be a very reliable core, where things just work. Perhaps CQC's "distributed" nature facilitates that notion? I'm presently using HomeSeer 2 Pro with multiple z-trollers, but I'm not using any other plug-ins for that very reason. Disappointing? Yes, but that trade-off seems preferable to the alternative. I'd rather do more advanced things outside of homeseer if it means at least basic functionality remains stable and reliable. I'm reluctant to say such a heretical thing, but I think the days of a single, monolithic, do-it-all home automation software package from one vendor (or one vendor and its retinue) are long gone. Prove me wrong, but to me it looks too much like a tar baby. At present I'm hoping python might facilitate my utilizing best-in-class point solutions when/if I ever need them, and so I'm at the very beginning of looking into that. I subscribe to the theory that you either start with a productive scripting language, or else you wind up inheriting yet another non-standard, ad-hoc, less productive scripting language later because of its initial absence at the very beginning, and then you're like one of those island nations where nobody else in the world speaks your language (and that in turn severely limits what you can easily leverage).
NeverDie said:
One of my core design principals is that all of the subsystems need to stand on their own and not be dependent on the automation software (system) to provide the intended functionality. Security, HVAC, lighting, Audio, Video, etc can all stand on their own to function and will just work. This is where / why I am leery of solutions that require cloud connectivity to function (a good number of the current consumer solutions fall into this category) violates rule #1 for me.
There in lies the rub, from a practical reliability stand point the subsystems need to work independently but in order to realize the true potential that automation provides they also need to inter-operate easily. Most of the MFGs still don't get this yet and so we who are on the bleeding edge have to put more complicated wrappers in place to make it all work together. And here it is that we loop. The good news is that with each iteration we are getting closer to the holy grail of complete "connectedness" (made the word up, sorry) that is reliable and is easy to use and maintain...
NeverDie said:
Take a look at EventGhost, it is open source and python based.
-Ben
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
In my opinion, you won't want the interactivity that is provided by most of the out of the box solutions. They will almost certainly be unsafe, insecure, etc... Having a centralized, and secure automation controller to provide not just the coordination but the access between players in the HA environment, IMO, is just as much a key role of the automation system. Most auto-magical schemes that will likely be supported at consumer level gear will almost certainly put simplicity and marketability ahead of security, i.e. auto-enrollment of devices just because they are sensed, and trying to include as many devices as possible with minimal intervention by the user. That looks good as a marketing blurb, but as a practical matter it's a neon invitation to hackers.
This is also a reason why serial, despite its apparent ancientness, has its benefits, because it's a one to one connection from HA system to devices under control, not a shared one that can be hijacked if you make a mistake and someone gets inside the perimeter. Though of course the modern trend of having IP based serial ports sort of cancels that benefit back out.
Add to the fact that every device is going to have its own app interface, which probably isn't terribly secure either, because it was written as a convenient afterthought to just check off a new required bullet list marketing item, and it probably will just get worse.
A central home automation system, controlling access via secure connections to devices, and controlling interaction between them, is the most secure scenario, and of course offers the greatest benefits in terms of turning all of those devices into a really coherent meta-system.
This is also a reason why serial, despite its apparent ancientness, has its benefits, because it's a one to one connection from HA system to devices under control, not a shared one that can be hijacked if you make a mistake and someone gets inside the perimeter. Though of course the modern trend of having IP based serial ports sort of cancels that benefit back out.
Add to the fact that every device is going to have its own app interface, which probably isn't terribly secure either, because it was written as a convenient afterthought to just check off a new required bullet list marketing item, and it probably will just get worse.
A central home automation system, controlling access via secure connections to devices, and controlling interaction between them, is the most secure scenario, and of course offers the greatest benefits in terms of turning all of those devices into a really coherent meta-system.
pete_c
Guru
Very true Dean.
Initially here thought the next step to my automation was Insteon. The introduction of wireless bridges between phases of tranport probably was one of the reasons why I have mostly abandoned its use these days.
My personal beliefs relative to automation is that the more you put between a controller and the controlled device the less resilent it is. (in a virtual sense or real sense, software or hardware).
802.11X Wireless is magical but it not the sure thing (or means of automation transport); never has been as long as I have been playing with it.
Creating a propietary wireless transport not having a clue about basics of networking is also a faux pas but it sells if it works most of the time.
Note the above stuff is just my opinion as I do play with everything these days.
tmbrown97
Senior Member
Fun thread - brings back floods of memories. I'm even a tad younger but had computers since I was a toddler so I've done it all - back in the days when you had to set your own IRQ's and COM ports and make sure mouse and modem weren't on the same channel - and back when himem.sys was your friend along with multiple boot configurations.
I've got so many fun memories over the years - crazy fun stuff.
My big one back then was to use a hex editor to mess with command.com and rewrite the responses to be profanities. You ask for drive G that doesn't exist? "Dream on a__hole, no such drive" - and many others like that.batwater said:
I've got so many fun memories over the years - crazy fun stuff.
Those early IBM compatible PCs had the worst hardware and operating systems, only on a PC did you have such a stupid memory problem. I soldered in a board and added an extra 2 megabytes of memory to my old 1985 Atari ST(wanted the Amiga but it was a lot more) and I had 2.5 megabytes to use, I got a 386 in 1992 and realized just how backwards PCs were at the time.
Now it doesn't matter anymore, my CQC computer running XP, never gets touched and never screws up.
Now it doesn't matter anymore, my CQC computer running XP, never gets touched and never screws up.
Now my youngest is complaining that his spouse has more RAM, more CPU speed, more CPU cores, more connection modems, and more graphics resolution in her cell phone than he has in his desktop computer.
Remember when MSDos came out? All the computer guys said "Just what we need! Another operating system. Why couldn't they just stick with one of the hundred we already have?" But the POS was only $19.95 and came with a 984 page manual in paper form that you could leave beside the toilet for consumption "on the job."
IBM put their name on it and for the first time businesses would have a personal computer in their office despite the huge step back to 8 bit computers with no interrupts connected so all I/O had to be polled and missed data. But it was IBM so it had to be good.
Remember when MSDos came out? All the computer guys said "Just what we need! Another operating system. Why couldn't they just stick with one of the hundred we already have?" But the POS was only $19.95 and came with a 984 page manual in paper form that you could leave beside the toilet for consumption "on the job."
IBM put their name on it and for the first time businesses would have a personal computer in their office despite the huge step back to 8 bit computers with no interrupts connected so all I/O had to be polled and missed data. But it was IBM so it had to be good.
pete_c
Guru
Sort of liked OS2 Warp; it was a bit of a race between Microsoft and IBM at the time.
I recall though that OS2 Warp was lacking a few drivers while Microsoft Windows 95 was already a bit seasoned.
I did see that OS2 Warp was used much in one bank in Chicago (LaSalle) and did have to deal with it in a commercial sense with some banking applications. Thinking too that IBM was using some proprietary secure disk format. (PFS?)
Geez did use a Commodore Pet computer for a BBS back in the 80's. Ran off a single 5 1/4 floppy drive. It was big and just sitting in the corner of one office I had. I had multiple (well pay phone lines) and Ventel modems attached to them. I do recall making some hardware gizmo to switch between the old modems running a 300 baud (?).
I recall though that OS2 Warp was lacking a few drivers while Microsoft Windows 95 was already a bit seasoned.
I did see that OS2 Warp was used much in one bank in Chicago (LaSalle) and did have to deal with it in a commercial sense with some banking applications. Thinking too that IBM was using some proprietary secure disk format. (PFS?)
Geez did use a Commodore Pet computer for a BBS back in the 80's. Ran off a single 5 1/4 floppy drive. It was big and just sitting in the corner of one office I had. I had multiple (well pay phone lines) and Ventel modems attached to them. I do recall making some hardware gizmo to switch between the old modems running a 300 baud (?).
