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RA2 is done via software. When you install the unit it will be seen by the repeater, and you can then add it using their software which talks to the repeater.

Charmed Quark Systems has released version 5.3 of its CQC automation platform.    The big ticket item for this version is a new, from the ground up Z-Wave driver. This is now our third Z-Wave driver, and they haven't gotten more fun to write. Our previous driver was based on the Leviton VRC0P...

Yeh, I put tape over any cameras, even on my phone, front and back. I do have an Echo but just for development/testing so it's off the rest of the time. In the longer run, it's not difficult to imagine the internet become essentially unusable for anyone with anything to lose. It cannot be...

  It's client/server sort of system, so you have to have the back end installed before you can install a client.

You can of course use regular old RDP. It's not going to have the same responsiveness as a native mode for the graphically rich (and finger scrollable) stuff that the IV can provide.

It would have to be some sort of wrapper I guess? Even then I'd be a little skeptical. Our IV is a complex program that consumes a lot of functionality that probably wouldn't be available.

  As I understand it, that doesn't include the Windows desktop, it's just the core of Windows. Since the purpose in this case is to run the touch screen client, that makes it a non-starter AFAIK.

  But it won't run Windows. If he runs Windows he gets our full bore touch screen client. It also means he can run other CQC functionality there later if he wants to.

To me, as long as you can get an aesthetically pleasing result, I think the mini-PC plus regular touch screen is a better deal. It keeps the PC and the touch screen separate for separate upgrade paths moving forward. And it can provide a lot of screen real estate for a quite reasonable price. HD...

What the integrator is always trying to avoid is that "Well I can buy it myself for less than that" argument that ends up sucking up so much of their time. It's not about competing against another integrator, which they have to do all the time, in terms of prices of installed systems. The...

  That could though get into a sticky legal situation, i..e how do you enforce a non-retail type sales policy when you openly allow integrators to get around it? Then someone comes along and effectively sets up a retail store in all but name, but how do you cut him off if he's just doing what...

It's the usual thing most likely. There's limited revenues available from DIYers for higher endy products; but, if you sell to DIYers, it costs you with integrators because they don't want to compete against direct sales. So it can sometimes be a financial necessity to limit sales to pros.

They're a little early, but a good one. 

For CQC, I always at least put out there the use of our headless audio player. It runs in the background as a driver, but it is the actual player. It can stream to any audio output. You can run multiple instances of the driver to feed separate zones. If you get a multi-output audio card...

CQC is something over a million lines of code, half general purpose, half product specific. I have something closer to 45 man years in it, and I'm only 55. I've worked on this one thing all that time, not jumped from this to that. So I've been able to refine it and refine it and refine it, but...

We are in the final stages of deploying a brand new, from the ground up Z-Wave driver (native Z-Stick type, dumping our old VRC0P driver.) From my testing so far, I will grudgingly admit that it does seem to have made improvements of late, though most of my test units are ZW+ types which may be...

  Uhhh.... no. Doing a full bore, commercial grade (i.e. not something like OpenHAB that is very primitive) is mind-mindbogglingly difficult. I have something like 45 man years in CQC, and it's taken everything I have to get it to where it is. Automation, as I've said before, is one of those...

It's a more and more common thing, as being discussed above. The 'old school' folks are trying to sell a product, so it's in their interest to create and publish a good API and make their products as integration friendly as possible. A lot of new companies seem to be more interested in selling a...

  Again, it's very easy to SAY that. But if it was that easy and that lucrative, it would have already been done. There's nothing preventing thousands of companies from creating such a product, folks who are not at all beholden to the current status quo. These things don't have to come from the...

  That's sort of a different argument though. Obviously there was going to be a move towards more standardized hardware as we came out of the adolescent years of big iron. I would argue that was more of a hardware driven change. Once that change occurred, towards more standardized, higher...