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Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Insteon Automation Support
« on: November 14, 2007, 12:43:25 am »
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but it's something you can't really argue with considering the vendors that produce the gear essentially create the protocols to sell their hardware. Old mentalities of ownership and royalties versus free information still hold true, but slowly I see even they are releasing their grasp as they're finally realizing they can't control what people do with it once it's out there.
Insteon bugged me that they "sell" sdk's to their products, but for the most part is you just need to know how to interact with the their plc's, which didn't take long for most people to reverse engineer or cobble together information anyways. Problem is, most every HA hardware product vendor that is worth a damn does too. So long as the companies don't mind the info being out there and don't sic lawyers on those for making their software better than they could, I'm somewhat ok with it, and hence invested by buying their product. Until there is some truly open-sourced hardware specs produced to do this, zigbee is about as close as you're going to get to it that is at least 802 spec.
As far as your work, for which I'm quite appreciative of, how does/has it trickle down to lmce releases as far as _any_ insteon functionality in their installs? Is it capable of integration into an existing install yet? My big thing was always wanting to avoid needing to rely on x10 compatibility, and was willing to wait for support (which still befuddles me is just coming now). I pissed away money on homeseer that I could never get to behave, and I'd have bought pluto by now if it had the support. I'll honestly take any scraps thrown. I need to get something to act as a HA controller, and LMCE was always my most promising option, short of the fact it worked with none of my hardware.
Insteon bugged me that they "sell" sdk's to their products, but for the most part is you just need to know how to interact with the their plc's, which didn't take long for most people to reverse engineer or cobble together information anyways. Problem is, most every HA hardware product vendor that is worth a damn does too. So long as the companies don't mind the info being out there and don't sic lawyers on those for making their software better than they could, I'm somewhat ok with it, and hence invested by buying their product. Until there is some truly open-sourced hardware specs produced to do this, zigbee is about as close as you're going to get to it that is at least 802 spec.
As far as your work, for which I'm quite appreciative of, how does/has it trickle down to lmce releases as far as _any_ insteon functionality in their installs? Is it capable of integration into an existing install yet? My big thing was always wanting to avoid needing to rely on x10 compatibility, and was willing to wait for support (which still befuddles me is just coming now). I pissed away money on homeseer that I could never get to behave, and I'd have bought pluto by now if it had the support. I'll honestly take any scraps thrown. I need to get something to act as a HA controller, and LMCE was always my most promising option, short of the fact it worked with none of my hardware.