Yea, I went throught this with homeseer, it does work with HAI but there driver is quite old and doesn't do all the functionallity. Thermostats are out, lights I think work ok. But I was going to carry homeseer and they told me they would not support HAI and and have no intensions of updating the driver so if HAI does an update and it brakes the driver you are out of luck. Both great systems I just wisht they would work together I have a small market for this since they do tend to complament each other.
By driver I assume you mean the plug-in. There are two plug-ins, a "classic" one for lack of a better term and a newer one. Some people preferred the older one because they thought that the RS-232 communications link worked better with it, so that is why it was left there. If you worked with the older one, then that might explain some of the issues you are seeing, but there is some confusion in the other claims.
Thermostats work as well as they can with the system - I have never had a problem with them when I was using them through the panel. However, when a thermostat is connected through the panel, you do not get the fan status, operating status, and cannot put it into Aux heat mode. These were all HAI design issues, not issues with the plug-in. That is why I moved all of my HAI thermostats to the separate HAI thermostat plug-in - you get all of those features back plus more, including the filter reminders, runtime counters, etc.
Pete has run into issues with the thermostats, but I honestly could not determine what was up with them and why he is having more problems than others - perhaps he has newer firmware, or perhaps there are too many thermostats - I don't know. I know that under the Omni-Link protocol, that you do NOT get instant notifications of anything - the panel has to be polled. Much of that has changed with HAI releasing a new communications DLL, something that I was looking for as many as 8 years ago when they first promised something like that, but as you mentioned we are not willing to rewrite the plug-in to make use of it because there simply is not enough demand.
We are, however, committed to supporting the existing plug-in, which is again contrary to what you believe. The current plug-in to the best of my knowledge works with everything in the system with the potential exception of the new OmniStat2 thermostats. I will be looking into making the changes needed to make these work though. If at the same time I can easily add support for some of the newer lighting technologies that they have, then I will do that too. However, every lighting technology that they add is done through mapping a device to an HAI Unit, and the only differences come in to play when you are commanding a light to do something and support was added for some of the special features of the device. What that means is, the support that is there for the Units today works between 75% and 100% with even the lighting technologies that were added after the plug-in was last updated. The reason it is not too easy to add support for more lighting technologies is because the plug-in queries the memory of the HAI panel to find out what type of lighting device a particular unit is, and if some of the memory allocations have changed with panel firmware updates, then this will not work anymore, and a whole new UI option to configure the lighting type would have to be added.
So to re-cap, the plug-in will be maintained with the current functionality as long as possible, and I will be taking a look at the newer thermostats as well. However, HAI wants to be able to do everything, and HomeSeer can do everything, and so with the demand that we have been seeing for the HAI plug-in, it does not make sense for us to develop a plug-in to a system that has so many redundant/overlapping features as ours, especially when a lot of the functionality is filtered or slimmed down in features so that the HAI panel can support it.
