The End is Near for HomeSeer 1.7x
- Thread starter BraveSirRobbin
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upstatemike
Senior Member
If your focus is HT that is certainly true. But if you want to dabble in telephone DTMF control or VR or parsing a lot of data from a serial line such as the logging port on a Panasonic phone system, or work with VWS and a home weather station, etc. is CQC there yet? Of course at the rate it is going, most of those features might get added before I have a chance to press the enter key on this post!Squintz said:
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
I have the core of an Ocelot driver in place. It's just not something that's very important in the professional market, so it's hard for us to justify spending a lot of time on it when there are so many things we need to do. I got the core driver in place in the hopes that some Ocelot advocate would then pick it up and take it from there. But so far no one has really been interested in doing so.
Everyone is going to have this or that piece of hardware that they want to use that's not going to be supported by a given automation product. It's unfortunate but fairly inevitable. In the case of very DIY oriented devices, in some cases the DIY community will have to help itself, and we make all the driver development tools very open and part of the product so they can do so.
In the larger scheme of things, particularly in the professional market, when you compare CQC to HS, things like being fully network distributed, having an extremely powerful front end system as part of the product, being extremely robust, and having powerful media management capabilities vastly outweigh something like Ocelot support, and we have to be driven by those priorities because of our limited development resources.
If anyone is interested in picking up the Ocelot driver, I'll be happy to work with you to get it done. These types of drivers for highy flexible devices are always best done by someone who knows and uses the product and best understands how it's used, which I definitely do not.
Squintz
Senior Member
Well since this is primarily a HS thread I hope not to get too far off topic. Sorry if I have hijacked the thread.
For starters CQC is 100% network distributable. So while HS does have VR (which not many people use) and TTS as a network distributable features CQC has its entire application as network distributable. Then you have the entire list of supported devices which I have taken the time to copy from the CQC web site for your easy looking. Then you have to take into account that many HS users want to create cool web pages and touch screen interfaces. CQC has implemented its own web server and as I am sure most of you know one of the best features of CQC is its built in ability to create fancy Tochscreen interfaces. Devices such as the ocelot could easily be supported by CQC if a user would like to write the driver for it. Drivers are not hard to write but they take time which Dean has very little of right now because of all the "NEW" features he is implementing. Instead of spending a ton of time fixing problems like HS has been doing Dean is implementing new features daily. Take the time and have a look for your self. The community atmosphere its self is also just as good as HS used to be.
For starters CQC is 100% network distributable. So while HS does have VR (which not many people use) and TTS as a network distributable features CQC has its entire application as network distributable. Then you have the entire list of supported devices which I have taken the time to copy from the CQC web site for your easy looking. Then you have to take into account that many HS users want to create cool web pages and touch screen interfaces. CQC has implemented its own web server and as I am sure most of you know one of the best features of CQC is its built in ability to create fancy Tochscreen interfaces. Devices such as the ocelot could easily be supported by CQC if a user would like to write the driver for it. Drivers are not hard to write but they take time which Dean has very little of right now because of all the "NEW" features he is implementing. Instead of spending a ton of time fixing problems like HS has been doing Dean is implementing new features daily. Take the time and have a look for your self. The community atmosphere its self is also just as good as HS used to be.
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
It's important to distinguish between an architectural lacking and just not having a driver for device X. VR is an architctural lacking that only we can fix. Supporting a weather station is just a device driver, and could be added at any time by us or anyone else who really wants to use a particular weather station and has the device driver writing skills (or who has a friend who does who can be bribed with beer or something.)
In general software architecture terms, CQC is light years ahead of HS. It just doesn't have as many device drivers (though the ones it has are all of high quality and free with the product, and we just passed 100 in the last release.) In our market, we require that all device drivers to be very high quality and reliable, which is just going to limit the number of them relative to a more hobbyist environment where someone can toss off a simple script and people are happy to deal with any quirks it might have.
VR has just not been something so far we've been interested in supporting because it has so low bang for the buck relative to lots of other things we could be working on. VR support could be added in an external way without any changes to the existing system. Our XML gateway server provides the outside world with an easy way to interface to CQC. Combine a third party VR package with a little glue code to invoke CQC operations. It just wouldn't be tightly integrated into the system as it would want to be ultimately if we supported it formally.
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
Just replying to other people's comments and questions... If they bring it up, I feel I should answer.
upstatemike
Senior Member
I understand your point about other folks writing device drivers but it remains something that is beyond my ability (and temperment) so I am completely dependent on the "plug and play" features of any given system.
As for VR, instead of changing the architecture, why not do a HAL driver and be done with it? This would also give you some phone features as a bonus.
As for "DIY" stuff, it depends on the bang for the buck. If you write a driver for every weather station made it is a lot of work for a very small audience. If you write a driver to support Virtual Weather Station, you gain support for every weather station made with very little effort. (You parse a text file and load the values into variables once a second. Period, done, the end. Dave Howard wrote the PowerHome VWS driver in like 5 seconds!)
Then there is the gray area stuff like SlimServer. The population of SlimServer users is way larger than most folks realize. That coupled with the many interface options (xPL, CLI, etc.) would lead one to believe that there would be a decent return for not too much effort, but I admit I am in no position to evaluate something like that.
As for VR, instead of changing the architecture, why not do a HAL driver and be done with it? This would also give you some phone features as a bonus.
As for "DIY" stuff, it depends on the bang for the buck. If you write a driver for every weather station made it is a lot of work for a very small audience. If you write a driver to support Virtual Weather Station, you gain support for every weather station made with very little effort. (You parse a text file and load the values into variables once a second. Period, done, the end. Dave Howard wrote the PowerHome VWS driver in like 5 seconds!)
Then there is the gray area stuff like SlimServer. The population of SlimServer users is way larger than most folks realize. That coupled with the many interface options (xPL, CLI, etc.) would lead one to believe that there would be a decent return for not too much effort, but I admit I am in no position to evaluate something like that.
Dean Roddey
Senior Member
We are a professional product, but very DIY friendly basically, which Crestron/AMX are definitely not. Mostly what makes a product DIY friendly is that all the tools are open and documented so that people can do it themselves.
jwilson56
Senior Member
Well David... I know that some have gotten it to work... I have not tried it with 2.1 as of yet... but like I said I will this fall. I also will need to have hsGirder to work as well.DavidL said:
OT Alert:
Its unfortunate that there is not a single application that does most of what people want. I think Mainlobby looks cool... and makes a great front end... its too bad thats its only a front end... I for one am tired of all the 'glue' that seems to be needed to pull all these functions together (that includes my own Now Playing solution).
For what HST charges for 2.1 it really should have a better front end... HS cries out for a distributed graphics interface...for setup I like the old HS 1.7 interface way better then the web one in 2.0 and see it as a major step backwards. Not that it is any good for the family to use for their day to day uses (hence the need for Mainlobby, Netremote and the many other ones over the years).
I like CQC's concept as a distributed application. It kind of combines ML & HS into a single application. But alas the lack of support for the W800 and Slink-e makes it a no go for me...I could possibly use the slink-e executable to send IR commands if CQC supports executing a command line. However I will never give up my W800. Not sure why this has not been fixed... wake up CQC.
I was hoping that Netremote/Girder 4 would mature to the point of acting as a full functional stand alone solution but that is way down the road.
What I would like to see (and maybe its close) is a Mainlobby/ELK solution that has an easy to use interface for creating events, handles web servering, TTS using good quality voices, ect. (basically all the features that makes some users still run HS). This would give it a high stability for the HA functions and a pretty user interface for the family to use.
As most of you know I created the Now Playing skin for Netmote. It really does do a great job of giving me a GUI interface for my music database as well as handling all my HA functions with a nice graphics interface. For now I will stick to what works. But when and if the GUI frontend/ELK matures enough to toss HS then I will probably go that route.
John
BraveSirRobbin
Moderator
John;jwilson56 said:
I must say that I could not have summed up my feelings with current choices in HA software better than you have done! My compliments my friend.
You are dead on! You would think that at least ONE of these companies would get a pulse of what a user base really wants. I realize this base can have a broad scope, but you would have to go pretty far for someone that does not want what you have listed in one package.
jwilson
"its too bad thats its only a front end... "
MainLobby is not just a front end. It's a full automation system too.
MainLobby Server 3 has event, timed, recurring, conditional, etc processing embedded in it. You can execute macros and control as many hardware devices as CQC is supporting. some missing, some additional, lots of overlap.
That is a common misconception because Cinemar adopts a "plug and play" strategy where you can use what you want to use. We don't hold any prejudice on what software we interact with. That provides you with choice.
But, you can use it completely stand alone as well.
Oh, MLSpeak (TTS for MainLobby Server) works just fine with many aftermarket voices.
And ELK M1 plugins, W800 and Slinke support (did that get your attention
)
I'll keep this Ad short
Oh, and I know you are a fan of J River Media Center... so are we. full support for that too
"its too bad thats its only a front end... "
MainLobby is not just a front end. It's a full automation system too.
MainLobby Server 3 has event, timed, recurring, conditional, etc processing embedded in it. You can execute macros and control as many hardware devices as CQC is supporting. some missing, some additional, lots of overlap.
That is a common misconception because Cinemar adopts a "plug and play" strategy where you can use what you want to use. We don't hold any prejudice on what software we interact with. That provides you with choice.
But, you can use it completely stand alone as well.
Oh, MLSpeak (TTS for MainLobby Server) works just fine with many aftermarket voices.
And ELK M1 plugins, W800 and Slinke support (did that get your attention
)I'll keep this Ad short
Oh, and I know you are a fan of J River Media Center... so are we. full support for that too
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