Elk M1 vs Bosch G-series?

[jeditekunum]

I'll just add a few points...

 
Most of that is the perspective of manufacturers and dealers/installers.
 
Of course there are businesses and many people who can afford pro installs, monitoring, support, and ongoing hand-holding. There are many people who cannot - or will not. Dealers/installers never would have benefited from them to begin with so they aren't losing anything if manufacturers become more friendly to DIYers. No doubt there are a lot of customers that no longer see the value of pro setups and will transition to DIY. Lost business for dealers/installers but that ship has sailed and its not coming back. You can't expect to have decreasing value (no innovation or reduction in cost) and expect things to go on forever.

I seriously doubt any published API for home automation is going to change the picture one bit. Those that want the API will simply not buy a product without one. Manufacturers and dealers/installers are kidding themselves if they think the lack of API availability helps them in any way.
 
The world changes and nobody can stop it. My parents owned a mom-n-pop TV/appliance business many years ago. See any of those anymore? Not very different from the typical alarm system dealer/installer. They too did "installs" of TV antennas, wiring, etc.
 
Lots of home services have shifted to mostly DIY. Plumbers. Electricians. People can't afford the time and money it takes to hire a "pro" to do simple things. The pros don't even want to do the small jobs anymore. Hell, even getting a lawyer to review a home construction contract is difficult.
 

I'd love to see a new panel come along - something up to date...

 
Interlogix UltraSync Modular Hub seems pretty modern to me.

 

[tmbrown97]

I believe I said this already... I used to be on your side of the argument, just as irritated... I mean, some of the tech savvy people on this forum alone do more to track down problems and bugs and even help develop interfaces than any pro. 
 
A little story... I've been good with electronics my whole life - tinkering from a very young age.  I installed car stereos and alarm systems before I was old enough to drive the cars, and I fully understood the diagrams and what everything was doing.  When I was 19, I bought my first brand new car (I grew up pretty poor, so this was a big deal).  I'd installed stereos and alarms before, including remote start, automatic windows, and all that... but for whatever reason, I decided to let a pro do that car (I knew my wiring was sound, but it wasn't as clean as the pros did it - because I always left excess wire in case I wanted to make future changes, making it look sloppier).  I knew the guy who was in charge of the overall mobile electronics shop at a local big box; he has degrees in robotics and electrical engineering.  Watching him do the install and asking for a couple custom things (we put a red light near the key cylinder to draw attention to the lack of keys when remote started; some other custom lights).  It was clear that, despite his rather impressive technical background, all he knew was "green here, red here, etc".  It really messed with his brain when I suggested anything not specified in the manual, such as the red light above.  I had to explain the concept that certain outputs are only energized when the car is running on remote start, and with a diode in the right place, it'll work perfect. He was reluctant and had to grab his meters and test my theories, eventually agreeing and getting it all hooked up the way I wanted.  That was also the only car I ever had an electrical issue with... one day one of his wires for the remote start rubbed through, and smoke filled the car. 
 
I'm not even sure of my own point here - other than most professional security and even lighting and automation installers aren't much different.  They connect this wire to that, and when things don't work as expected, they're lost.  If they were any better with electronics, they'd get out of the grunt-work of installing and end up in a higher level position somewhere (same reason I hate Geek Squad type people - if they actually knew anything, they'd have real, good paying tech jobs!).  In this prosumer DIY group (many CT'ers) we have people with tremendous technical skill who can add value to these companies - by helping them debug problems and look at things in different ways...  HomeSeer in general is a great example of that... that community has built plugins for everything you can dream of.  It would be nice if we could bring that same technical expertise and be able to DIY something like a Control4 system - but, that'll never happen. 
 
Hopefully the market will continue to evolve, and people will get sick of being nickle and dimed to death on every single app and look for something better...

 

[jeditekunum]

It would be nice if we could bring that same technical expertise and be able to DIY something like a Control4 system - but, that'll never happen. 

 
I think it will. There is nothing inherently difficult about anything from Crestron, Savant, Control4, or anything else. Their advantage is that they are mostly turn-key and they have a wide breadth of integrations. A big premium is paid for those aging features. There are open source things like OpenHAB that are progressing.
 
There are people that are in awe over the functionality of a typical satellite box/DVR like DirecTV. They are not the culmination of a massive investment in innovation and engineering by the sat company. They are basically a custom PC made of mostly off-the-shelf components (microprocessors, memory, disk drives, etc) running a modified Linux operating system. The application-specific software they have is not at all impressive to those of us that are software engineers. There won't ever be a DIY home brew sat receiver/DVR simply because the satellite data stream is proprietary and encrypted. Nothing of the sort limits an automation or alarm system and they pale in comparison as far as sophistication.
 
Given enough interest and time I could duplicate any of those systems - and so could many other people. I'm probably going to do that with the functionality I need over time. Loxone will be my core initially but there are things about it I don't like. I've already designed and built some of the hardware so part of my installation will be DIY hardware & software from the start. I will never try to replace the life-safety functionality of an alarm system but will just interface to a commercial product. I'm putting in a central dimming system for a fraction of the cost of the "big boys"; my switch system + Loxone + commercial DMX dimmer panel.
 
Overall I'm probably going to have a setup that would have cost me $100K+ for automation, lighting, security, etc going the pro route. For less than $10K the DIY way. That's a lot of incentive! Its the difference between having it or not. Fortunately I have the knowledge and time to make it happen.

 

[Dean Roddey]

I think it will. There is nothing inherently difficult about anything from Crestron, Savant, Control4, or anything else. Their advantage is that they are mostly turn-key and they have a wide breadth of integrations. A big premium is paid for those aging features. There are open source things like OpenHAB that are progressing.

 
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 things where it's so easy to draw some boxes on a white board and connect them and think, OK, not so bad. Then you get into it, and it's incredibly difficult. 
 
It's one thing to hack something up for yourself, it's a whole other thing to build something that is a real product, that deals with all of the messy issues that real products have to deal with, that has to bring along all the old customers over time while making huge changes in the product, that has to have lots of good quality documentation, that has to interface to the real world and all of the weirdness that can cause, that has to cover a huge range of functionality, and that has to be very customizable by the user but retain solid control over everything.
 
It's a huge undertaking.

 

[jeditekunum]

I'm familiar with software product development - Fortune 500 computer and ISVs. Software products in the 10's of millions of lines. Hundreds of developers. (Those two things by themselves bring unimaginable grief.) Billions of dollars in revenue. I can't even guess the number of person years (10's of thousands). I've personally developed more than a million lines of product code.
 
I sympathize with the feelings but the world no longer views software as having any significant value. In all fairness most of what is done with software these days is minor polishing of massive amounts of depreciated prior work. That's why corporations have been pushing it offshore for decades. What once cost thousands of dollars is pennies worth of work in a 3rd-world tech sweatshop. Is the result as good? Definitely not. But "good enough" - a trend started many years ago by a certain company in Redmond.

 

[Dean Roddey]

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 without it growing brittle in the usual ways that large team based software does over time. When changes were required I took the time to do it right. It's a very unusual product in that sense. It's very mature but without the aches  and pains of old age.
 
Of course if you throw in the code I've shipped and later replaced wholesale, and the stuff I wrote as a mercenary before then, I'm probably closer to one and quarter million at this point. 
 
It's not the kind of thing anyone is going to do in a sweat shop, at least not in any way you'd want to actually trust in your home. It's a million lines of extremely complex, very mature and highly integrated code. The sheer complexity of it would just make very few companies want to jump in. That's why of course very few companies have. Given the hot topic'ness of automation, if companies could throw out $10M and get a great product in a sweatshop a number of them would have already.
 
And there's an important difference of course. These types of products (high end automation systems) are not primarily (or at all in many cases) end user products, so the whole valuing of software issue isn't the same. It's a tool for professionals to generate revenue for themselves. That gives it a lot more value, because they also have to support what they install, and they aren't going to install any crap products. Quality does matter in that world.