HA Software Info: Omnipotence ECS

[BwiggleS]

Hi Everyone,

Watching these forums a lot of different software is used, but omnipotence ECS seems to have a large array of supported devices but not a lot of posts about it. I know they don't run a forum and use an email list instead which I don't really like.

I have just purchased my first few insteon devices and am using the trial version of housebot. I would like to try out Houselinc but they don't seem to have a trial version. I will be trying out ECS next. I want to do the usual things, lighting, sprinklers as well as speech recognition, home theatre etc.

Does anyone use this software? I am looking for comments and opinions on the software they use, as well as ECS.

Thanks,

Brad

 

[roussell]

I looked at ECS a while back - my personal conclusion was that if I was in the market for HA software in that price range - HomeSeer and CQC represented better values with more exposure and peer-based support. My price range was lower however so I was in the free - $100 slot. That gave my HouseBot, PowerHome, Misterhosue, Premise and a few others. I ultimately settled on HouseBot because at the time there were no other offerings in that price range that offered the excellent GUI touchscreen ability. I don't know if anything can still touch it for the price. Have you looked at PowerHome? It just might have the best support for Insteon gear outside of the ISY.

Terry

 

[mterry63]

I used ECS for many years. Mark Gilmore, the author, provides excellent support and is a great guy. I moved to Homeseer about 6 years ago for standard windows scripting support and to move away from the 'single author' platform thinking that a group of people would provide a better product (very few products of this scope come from a single author) but after the fact I'm not sure I really gained everything I'd hoped for. Homeseer is much more in step with Windows development (Mark would occasionally openly bash Microsoft, not that they don't deserve it or that a lot of other people don't - but if you're a Windows developer what's the point?) but Homeseer still seem resource strapped (especially lately) and sometimes leave a lot of things incomplete before moving on to the next shiny object.