What do you think?
- Thread starter Robin Grunwald
- Start date
shenandoah75
Active Member
Since i'm up and thinking about HA and my ongoing delemma at this hour i'll chip in and i hope you'll take it as constructive. Understand i am extremely critical and you can summise what i'm looking for in a package in others recent posts (i.e. the holy grail of H/A software) ...
- the price is good, lack of zwave is bad (i know your faq says you plan to support it), but others already do - that doesn't bode well for you
- windows is bad, but overlookable for most people
- the scheduling / sunrise/set is all doable via the elk on its own
- remote access is nothing new and offered by most everyone. again elk would offer this for if i wanted it simply by using port forwarding in my router
- elk can do all the smoke/event triggering given as example
- on the gui front, the overlay and weather integration is nice in the price range
But, i can buy a rock solid hardware platform that doesnt rely on a PC 24x7 for slightly more and nearly everything you offer save a little gui and i think it's more reliable (gets me the even driven stuff, lighting integration with more technologies, I/O, voice announcements). You are not offering me the gap/void that i want fillled in my own setup up which is media integration + a slick gui. I think what you're offering is similar to other players in this field in similar price ranges (or to freeware)
If you want to be a serious player in this field, i have two words of caution:
1) i would strongly caution you against using verbiage such as the following in your advertising:
"also impressing your friends."
Most of us are not in this and spending the money we're spending to impress people. We're doing because we want to make our own lives more convienent. If it was about impressing friends, a purchase of CQC/ML purchase would have been a no brainer. There are those that think voice activaton is great, but many like me who do not and I have no intention of ever implementing it, especailly not to impress someone else. Maybe there are those "jones' who for your price would pay for something to show off, but i think most of the people in the forum aren't that shallow... Powerhungry, maybe
2) You really need to do a market analysis and see how you stack up. I see little that you can offer to differenciate yourself based on the content of your website and i think you really should think long and hard about how you intent to demonstrate your product offers something better. As one of the lesser knowns, i would strngly recommend you create a feature comparison matrix on your website that shows how you stack up against other vendors:
http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=1768
In closing, I strongly feel we need more competition not in the basic H/A/lighting/event arena but in Media control arena and/orit's integration with H/A. I think the H/A only market is saturated and offers little value to anyone running a robust platform like Elk to start with. The pricing of CQC/ML leaves room for competiton, but the catchup game would hinder anyone entering the field. Dean and David's packages are pretty darn impressive in terms of features sets and drivers offered. I don't see how anyone could get into that area outside of open source where profit is not a concern and make any headway - those guys are just too far ahead I'd be impressed if a for-profit could come along and become a serious competitor along side them, frankly i'd expect them to fold in short order (and i've seriously thought about it myself and might have tried if i could have enlisted a lot of bright minds with me)
- brad
- the price is good, lack of zwave is bad (i know your faq says you plan to support it), but others already do - that doesn't bode well for you
- windows is bad, but overlookable for most people
- the scheduling / sunrise/set is all doable via the elk on its own
- remote access is nothing new and offered by most everyone. again elk would offer this for if i wanted it simply by using port forwarding in my router
- elk can do all the smoke/event triggering given as example
- on the gui front, the overlay and weather integration is nice in the price range
But, i can buy a rock solid hardware platform that doesnt rely on a PC 24x7 for slightly more and nearly everything you offer save a little gui and i think it's more reliable (gets me the even driven stuff, lighting integration with more technologies, I/O, voice announcements). You are not offering me the gap/void that i want fillled in my own setup up which is media integration + a slick gui. I think what you're offering is similar to other players in this field in similar price ranges (or to freeware)
If you want to be a serious player in this field, i have two words of caution:
1) i would strongly caution you against using verbiage such as the following in your advertising:
"also impressing your friends."
Most of us are not in this and spending the money we're spending to impress people. We're doing because we want to make our own lives more convienent. If it was about impressing friends, a purchase of CQC/ML purchase would have been a no brainer. There are those that think voice activaton is great, but many like me who do not and I have no intention of ever implementing it, especailly not to impress someone else. Maybe there are those "jones' who for your price would pay for something to show off, but i think most of the people in the forum aren't that shallow... Powerhungry, maybe
2) You really need to do a market analysis and see how you stack up. I see little that you can offer to differenciate yourself based on the content of your website and i think you really should think long and hard about how you intent to demonstrate your product offers something better. As one of the lesser knowns, i would strngly recommend you create a feature comparison matrix on your website that shows how you stack up against other vendors:
http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=1768
In closing, I strongly feel we need more competition not in the basic H/A/lighting/event arena but in Media control arena and/orit's integration with H/A. I think the H/A only market is saturated and offers little value to anyone running a robust platform like Elk to start with. The pricing of CQC/ML leaves room for competiton, but the catchup game would hinder anyone entering the field. Dean and David's packages are pretty darn impressive in terms of features sets and drivers offered. I don't see how anyone could get into that area outside of open source where profit is not a concern and make any headway - those guys are just too far ahead
I'd be impressed if a for-profit could come along and become a serious competitor along side them, frankly i'd expect them to fold in short order (and i've seriously thought about it myself and might have tried if i could have enlisted a lot of bright minds with me)- brad
upstatemike
Senior Member
OH pleeease don't go down the media control/fancy gui path! There are already too many offerings out there that offer media control and a fancy gui AND VERY LITTLE ELSE! If people want a gui to control their media they can look into a Sonos or Slimserver system... While I agree that there is an overabundance of offerings with half-finished lighting support, I do not think the HA market is anywhere near saturated in other key areas:
Voice announcements are just plain lame in most current systems... you can't change voices on the fly, you can't deliver different messages to different places at the same time. Often you can't prioritize messages or keep them from talking over each other. Since I would NEVER see myself using my HA system as a front end to run my stereo, the only purpose for even having media integration would be to distribute HA voice announcements but first the system needs to have a robust and feature packed voice announement system to distribute!
HVAC control is extremely lame in most HA systems. If all you want is remote control or automatic setback then you don't even need an HA system, there are plenty of stand-alone thermostats to handle those requirements. The market is definitely NOT saturated with HA systems that will let you use a change in setpoint as a trigger; that will allow the system to verbally confirm manual and automatic setpint changes; that allow you to control your HVAC from multiple low cost interfaces (such as keypads) rather than requiring super expensive touch screens everywhere; and so on.
Weather Station Support is weak in most current HA systems. Either they pick one brand to support so you are out of luck if you use different hardware, OR they just don't bother at all assuming that whatever can be scraped off the internet from the nearest big city should be good enough.
ASCII support is poor or difficult to use in most current HA systems. Most legacy hardware could be easily incorporated with the simple inclusion of a simple way to accept and send and parse ASCII messages. For some reason many developers will spend time creating "plug ins" for all manner of obscure hardware but will not provide a simple generic ASCII interface.
Telephone support is almost non-existent in most current HA offerings. Some will provide basic touch tone control or CID triggering but simple things like dialing into a phone system paging system to make an announcement is totally beyond them. (Of couse with the super lame voice announcements noted above I guess they wouldn't have too much to say even if they could dial the paging system).
Many systems also lack any way to kick off batch files, exe files, or wavs. This is another one of those simple generic interfaces that immediately lets the system take advantage of things like xPL or various PC widgets, but is very limited or missing in many current HA systems.
Finally, the weakest weakest link in current HA offerings is the rules engines. Current offerings come in only 2 categories: 1- easy to use but too limited to do very much OR 2- versatile but only if you are willing to learn complex scripting languages or detailed function parameters (turning a pleasant automation idea into a painful chore to implement). I don't think you can say the HA market is saturated until you have a lot of competitors offering a "point and click" rules interface that has the depth of options offered in a scripting language or PowerHome style function library.
I think folks who want a media control system with a gui interface should shop specifically for that (or use the one included in MS operating systems). Just don't call it an HA system and don't overlook the opportunities for improvement still out there in the "true" HA controller market.
shenandoah75
Active Member
I take back my initial warning that i'm critical given upstatemike's summary :blink:
Maybe i'm just wrong and out here by myself not desiring half of what Mike and others might... I'll ackowledge that i'm really less interested in H/A then i am having control. Knowledge (annoucements) and hands off automation take a back seat to my requirements (do what i wnat when i want it and tell me whats going on when i want to know - and ithat is the same whether its media, security, lighting, pool whatever), and i'm likely in the minority so ignore me if i'm not your target market.
But even we go with mike's desires, count up the number of H/A vendors and those meeting the things listed. Maybe its not saturated in terms of the holy grail, but there are a ton of options out there that claim to do H/A that don't... In the past week two vendors have posted here claiming to offer the greatest new thing.
That said, i'm curious if you feel that this product with its weather/voice/event engine/etc is closer than others in meeting your wish list or no?
-brad
Maybe i'm just wrong and out here by myself not desiring half of what Mike and others might... I'll ackowledge that i'm really less interested in H/A then i am having control. Knowledge (annoucements) and hands off automation take a back seat to my requirements (do what i wnat when i want it and tell me whats going on when i want to know - and ithat is the same whether its media, security, lighting, pool whatever), and i'm likely in the minority so ignore me if i'm not your target market.
But even we go with mike's desires, count up the number of H/A vendors and those meeting the things listed. Maybe its not saturated in terms of the holy grail, but there are a ton of options out there that claim to do H/A that don't... In the past week two vendors have posted here claiming to offer the greatest new thing.
That said, i'm curious if you feel that this product with its weather/voice/event engine/etc is closer than others in meeting your wish list or no?
-brad
beelzerob
Senior Member
I noticed the max num of com ports said 8....was that per PC or something? Most people I know would bust through that limit immediately.
But, in an effort to offer some encouragement, I will say that CQC only has 3 verbose levels, where Adaptive Home Logic has 99.
upstatemike
Senior Member
What were you looking for? (And please don't say a GUI based media control system!)
Better graphics of course.
ODBC connectivity.
and more.
I don't care about media control. I have no interest in it, just like this this software.
The guy wanted an honest comment. I gave it.
upstatemike
Senior Member
Sure but it needs to be a constructive comment that he can use to improve things. What kind of graphics were you thinking of? He has the fancy overlay examples for the garage door. Are you looking for a more decorative font for the event log or what exactly? Also what would be an example application for using ODBC connectivity? (Not something I would have thougt to ask for).)
*********
Sure but it needs to be a constructive comment that he can use to improve things. What kind of graphics were you thinking of? He has the fancy overlay examples for the garage door. Are you looking for a more decorative font for the event log or what exactly? Also what would be an example application for using ODBC connectivity? (Not something I would have thougt to ask for).)
*********
I can't get more constructive than that on the graphics, except the look is old and I don't like photo-type overlays...they're corny and easy (to each his own - I know). Graphics are really boring to talk about but are important because they should add tremendous intution to an application - usually graphics can make or break an application to the average end-user that isn't very tech savvy and judges by the appearance first then function, but they still should be smooth and use vector graphics with color gradients. You shouldn't waste space either.
Seems the average end-user that pays for an install has enough cash to afford a better looking interface and would be turned off by this one despite any technical superiority. They simply wouldn't care - you get what you pay for.
ODBC is very critical and I use it often for all my apps I develop for work. Since databases are the universal connection point between any application, open database connectivity (ODBC) is super-important to build in to any app. If you have it, you can write data points to a datatable for later use in some other application or simple datalogging and graph generation. Or you can read data from tables that another app may have written to. I know most commerical/consumer based products use flat files for data storage, but this is deffinitely an old school approach to data collection since you can't do anything with the files after the fact. There is no "structured query language" for flat files so you're stuck with it unless you have some other app that parse and puts it in a database - so just put it in a database to start with!
However, most end-users don't give a flying f*#$ about databases and data monitoring, but I do yummy SCADA. Sounds goofy I know, but my work involves me doing operator interfaces for machines and supervisory and data acquistion (SCADA). That's how I got into HA. I saw the immediate application for a home operator interface and began acquiring controllers to do such.
Hopefully my long-winded answer makes some sense anyway.
Sure but it needs to be a constructive comment that he can use to improve things. What kind of graphics were you thinking of? He has the fancy overlay examples for the garage door. Are you looking for a more decorative font for the event log or what exactly? Also what would be an example application for using ODBC connectivity? (Not something I would have thougt to ask for).)
*********
I can't get more constructive than that on the graphics, except the look is old and I don't like photo-type overlays...they're corny and easy (to each his own - I know). Graphics are really boring to talk about but are important because they should add tremendous intution to an application - usually graphics can make or break an application to the average end-user that isn't very tech savvy and judges by the appearance first then function, but they still should be smooth and use vector graphics with color gradients. You shouldn't waste space either.
Seems the average end-user that pays for an install has enough cash to afford a better looking interface and would be turned off by this one despite any technical superiority. They simply wouldn't care - you get what you pay for.
ODBC is very critical and I use it often for all my apps I develop for work. Since databases are the universal connection point between any application, open database connectivity (ODBC) is super-important to build in to any app. If you have it, you can write data points to a datatable for later use in some other application or simple datalogging and graph generation. Or you can read data from tables that another app may have written to. I know most commerical/consumer based products use flat files for data storage, but this is deffinitely an old school approach to data collection since you can't do anything with the files after the fact. There is no "structured query language" for flat files so you're stuck with it unless you have some other app that parse and puts it in a database - so just put it in a database to start with!
However, most end-users don't give a flying f*#$ about databases and data monitoring, but I do yummy SCADA. Sounds goofy I know, but my work involves me doing operator interfaces for machines and supervisory and data acquistion (SCADA). That's how I got into HA. I saw the immediate application for a home operator interface and began acquiring controllers to do such.
Hopefully my long-winded answer makes some sense anyway.
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