I'm sure Dean (main author, CTO) will do a better job than I about 'splaining it, but here's my take as a user. Also, if you want to spend 90 mins learning more, check out the "Intro to HA" webinar in my sig as it'll walk you through the basics. It's the recording of a webinar a few of us did several months ago, IIRC there were 1-2 pro's on the call asking some questions you might find interesting.
CQC is a top-tier home automation software solution that acts as both the "front-end" user interface and the "back-end" automation engine to control your whole house. Key features include:
- Single price. All drivers, graphics, multiple servers, are all included in the single price.
- Point & Click setup. No learning funky command structures to build up back-end logic or front-end screens.
- Truly network distributed. Use any PC in the network to build screens, modify logic. And, as the standard homeowner has multiple PCs, you can leverage all those PCs to accomplish your goals. If a piece of equipment happens to be near a certain PC, just install a CQCServer on it, connect the equipment, and you're good to go.
- Highly secure & stable. Drivers are written in one of 2 CQC proprietary languages, so there's no possibility of a rogue driver taking down your system. One language is basically a pseudo-code type language, which nearly anyone can pick up but it's not too powerful. The other is a full blown object-oriented language. I used the pseudo-code language to write a driver in about 2 hours from first reading about it, but it didn't do that much. Just wrote a bunch of commands, and read 1 state from the device.
- Ability to custom create screens for PDAs using the same Interface Builder as regular PCs, without resorting to programming. I would think that for the pro, this would be a nice differentiator as you could *very quickly* take any custom-built PC screen and create a PDA equivalent.
- Direct, optimizable, & secure support for PDAs to connect to the homeowners install over a cellular network, without resorting to "logmein" or other 3rd party software. The optimizable portion refers to the ability to only download images once per connection, even if it's used dozens of times in the screens. You're downloading much fewer bytes, so the performance is great. Optimizable & direct is huge, I can use the PDA screens in the site in my sig on my cellphone, over the AT&T network.
From a cost perspective, i'd think you'd save some money over an AMX install, but i'm not sure how much. The bigger benefits (to me, the layman) would be the ability to custom-fit solutions with relatively little effort given that it's all point & click.
There's a CQC Users Group Webinar on 8/30, @8:30am PST if you want to lurk.
