Thank you for your kind comments over the last few days. To expand on the topic mentioned:-
Although the Adaptive Home Logic application can operate quite happily on it own, reporting any changes in status by text to the screen, by speech, etc. (which some people prefer) it can also function completely graphically, using one or more interactive screen overlay scenes, being controlled via a mouse and or a standard PC touch screen as well as speech input, etc.
A screen overlay scene is simply an image file (gif, jpg, or bmp format), which can consist of just graphics or a picture or both, that is placed on the desktop (transparency / size adjustable). Multiple scenes may be created (allowing you to zoom into a particular area), and selected or turned on or off via the system tray. The screen overlay scene can also display a wide variety of system information, whilst using as little resources as possible.
The Adaptive Home Logic application can be easily configured to react to different graphics (or different parts of the picture) being clicked (or touched via a touch screen) within the screen overlay scene, it can also change parts of an image (with text and or graphics) to reflect any change in its status.
The advantage of this is that the application can be setup and utilised the way you want it to be, with the graphics, pictures or layout that you want, and / or to report its status with text messages (display and / or spoken) that you define. These things have not been presumed for you, it’s not inflexible or otherwise fixed in its ways.
I wonder how hard it would be to use this with RCS thermostats using an RS232 to RS485 converter?
The RCS thermostats uses ASCII based freeform character strings, so does the Adaptive Home Logic application so this should not present any problems. It just a case of entering the appropriate control sentence within the Send Data (True) or Send Data (False) fields within an event’s Serial Com Port Data section, depending on whether you want the event to send the control sentence when it fires or when it loses its true status.
There should also be no problems using a RS-232 to RS-485 (or indeed a RS-422) converter (Hub), however this has highlighted a very minor problem, in that the program was originally designed to monitor / control one device attached to one com port (although it can monitor / control up to 8 Com ports concurrently), however only a very slight adjustment to the code is necessary for the program to be able to control multiple devices on one multi-point serial link. This update will be made, tested and released within the next week or so. To install any updates simple download the latest version of the application. This will replace the existing application leaving the user data and licence intact.
The Adaptive Home Logic application uses Window’s built-in communications API, so if you have a multipoint communication card together with a Windows driver to support it, the application should be able to use any port on the card.
The Adaptive Home Logic application offer flexibility, not being fixed or limited to just a few supported devices, providing a software solution that can build on without compelling you to invest in expensive propriety devices.
Also might be a challenge to do lighting control if you have to send raw commands to an Insteon PLC.
We are looking into this and will comment on this question in due course. Although a nice idea, we’re not so sure this is the way to go, embedding data into AC power distribution is notoriously unreliable and not recommend by the power supply companies, or at least not in the UK, as they send their own data to control sub stations, etc. We are more interested in reliability and integrating industrial type controllers, especially when there is a concern about security. I sometime think that people have forgotten how much fun and how satisfying it can be to have a neat, secure and reliable cable distribution.
If there is no objection I am going to copy the question and answer on this topic to the Adaptive Home Logic community to help get it started.
Robin Grunwald
Acentient Software
