Switching audio via an Ocelot and SECU's

I'm with you Jeff! My Ocelot, SECU's, SpeakEasy etc. haven't missed a beat in the 5+ years they've been in service!

I look at ADI as a "cottage industry" company - small, but very good in their specialized niche market.

Many companies have almost no support and, while the ADI board is not perfect, it is a great tool for getting questions sorted out with the experts. When required, ADI does jump in on a thread but quite frankly, I'd rather have them spend their resources on product development than on monitoring web boards! One could argue in any case, that the best experts for answering many users questions are those who are already using the products in a similar fashion?

I also follow several other boards (e.g. Ulead which is a very large company) where the companies involved never post.

X10 is a huge company by comparison to ADI but have poor products and even poorer support (they appear to rely on public Newsgroups and FAQ's)?

John W

In defense of ADI, most of their personnel are engineers. Some got drafted to do the documentation and set up the forum. It's really outside their skillset. And the HA market is much, much smaller than all the sturm und drang in CHA might lead one to believe.

Also, runn>> > "Bill Kearney" wrote

That's a basic problem with engineers - so many attempt work clearly outside their skillset. Seriously, if you get a toothache, you go to a dentist, you don't buy MicroSoft's "Dentist on a Disk" and try to do it yourself because it looks like you can. If you know something's outside your skillset there are better options than just muddling through and hoping for the best. The ADI forum started as a mailing list. Why it couldn't stay that way is anybody's guess.

I guess that's still the "read it and weep" bottom line. HA, particularly at the Ocelot level is really niche stuff. Still, your website efforts show that a nice, simple, hierarchical design that presents the information in a format that's easy to understand *isn't* beyond the reach of even "engineering types." :-)

Which is precisely why running a forum *shouldn't* be part of their business. At least 1/2 of the posts in the forum have relevance outside of ADI. Usenet has search engines, newsreaders, easy-to-save messages, etc. Reinventing the wheel and using a hexagon instead makes for a bumpy ride. I'm not sure what was wrong with a mailing list or Usenet, but it seems they opted for the least optimal solution.

It's been a useful examination, though, and I'm sorry if I riled any feathers. I've been fussing with teaching my CPUXA IR codes that the X-10 remote can't learn and the results haven't been encouraging. I've also been struggling with C-MAX and I realize now that I'd be much better off polishing up my Unix than learning C-MAX.

More importantly, I also realized that if I want to avoid obsolescence, I should stick with mini-PCs. They aren't a "sole supplier" item like the Leopards - years of government procurement experience makes me shiver when I see those two words. A Leopard and a mini-pc with a USB touchscreen LCD cost about the same, but their capabilities are a galaxy apart.

Wasn't it you that said once you've seen full motion video on an LCD screen it's hard to settle for static bitmaps? Well, if I am going to deploy LCD control panels throughout the house, they *have* to be capable of showing me who's at the front door. Perhaps I missed it, but that sort of home automation doesn't seem to be part of the Leopard's skillset.

-- Bobby G.

Hey, worth every penny that registration costs you, right?

Yeah, some sites suck more than others. But think back a few years. I'm not complaining!

No, I wouldn't go that far. Too many of us online folks are SERIOUSLY over-skilled compared to the 'real people' slaving away at those real jobs.

Well, I'd put more emphasis on how well the actual product works, not just the web forums.

True, but babysitting a PC, over time, is a LOT more tedious that set-and-forget appliance-like boxes.

And if a meteor struck tomorrow we'd likewise be screwed.

The curse of proprietary/bleeding edge.

SO true.

Oh now from THAT perspective, yes, a PC would certainly be a lot more flexible and less of a pain to get configured. Just aim for building it as 'appliance-like' as possible. Heck, if you can run the stuff in linux I'd go for one of those low-end router device hacks. Soekris (sp?) comes to mind.

Yeah, all your points are valid. Hopefully they'll re-energize themselves.

-Bill Kearney

"John W" in the 5+ years they've been in service!

No one's saying they're not more reliable than a PC. Simple is always likely to be more reliable than complex. But the whole HA industry seems to be leaving them in the dust.

I look at them from a government and military critical item procurement standpoint. That analysis says they are a precariously small shop, they may have "key man" problems, they are the sole source of their equipment, they haven't made any improvements for 3 years, they apparently don't support any of the newer HA protocols and the rest of the industry has grown to the point where I can buy a whole Mini PC a little bigger than the Leopard for the cost of a Leopard. If I were buying these for the USMC, I'd have to insist on a hell of spares program - maybe three levels deep. These are the kind of small shop problems that have led to such a serious shortage of ceramic plates for body armor for US troops.

And I won't buy products from them unless the web has comfortable level of user-sponsored support. That's where lots of people using the product in lots of different environments may even be MORE useful than company tech support coming from off-shore dweebs who can't even understand the questions posed to them.

There's no doubt about that, but it seems, all in all, that a much smaller percentage of overall HA experts read through that forum. That's probably because it's so bloody hard to search and appaers to be equally as hard to see if anyone's left a message for you. They would be selling a lot more Ocelots if people here in CHA were to read of the interesting things that people are doing with them. ADI, IMHO, is shooting their own feet off with crappy forum software, FAQ's that aren't and no serious presence on Usenet.

That begs the question: what have they produced in the last three years of operating in that mode? There are people asking for RF, translators, more memory, bidirectional serial Bobcats and more. Apparently they've been asking for years. If ADI were truly as busy as beavers I can see them not monitoring the web forum closely. But that's not what I see. It tells me, as Dave suggested, that Ocelots and such are not their bread and butter but a sideline.

Scan Google for Epia or Via or Mini-ITX. There are thousands more active discussions in Usenet, on mailing lists, at the VIA website, etc. then at the ADI forum. Which should I trust my house's central nervous system to? A Mini-PC that I can program in languages that I am comfortable with, that can replace a SpeakEasy, talk to RS-232, Ethernet, IR, IDE, floppy, Firewire, VGA and USB without buying more modules and that can be replaced even if Via goes bankrupt because there are so many units in play. Or should I use a controller from a cottage industry that can do only 1/50 of the above, whose programs look like spaghetti code, whose memory is miniscule and appears to be not upgradeable, and whose "keepers" seem to have lost interest in the product?

Hot Button! When I went looking for FAQs at ADI, I kept getting bounced back into the forums. Why do they announce they have a FAQ when they don't?!!!! This URL

which alleges to provide a LeopardII FAQ dumps me in the forum where I see a list like this:

[new] Icon 1 Cover for the Lep 2 gdm 3 February 01, 2006 01:54 PM [new] Icon 1 IR using LEP2 doesn't work gdm 7 January 31, 2006 08:31 PM [new] Icon 5 Should I upgrade to Leo II? Steve13 3 January 29, 2006 04:46 PM [new] Icon 9 HELP!!!SOS!! Leopard II Albina 1 January 27, 2006 08:54 AM [new] Icon 1 HELP!!! SOS Leopard II Albina 0 January 27, 2006 05:09 AM [new] Icon 1 bad news Vaidas 4 January 24, 2006 04:07 PM [new] Icon 1 Leopard Master or Slave? Todd R. 13 January 22, 2006 07:03 PM [old] Icon 1 PRESET DIM LEVELS RM 3 January 19, 2006 03:18 PM

Oy Vey Ismir!!!!! A reverse chronological listing of forum posts IS NOT A FAQ! :-)

Not only do they PROGRAM in ladder logic, they do EVERYTHING in ladder logic. They appear to expect users to scan every message in a giant read loop and pluck out what they need that way. If they know they've got a lousy search engine, then can't they PLEASE put things in a FAQ in some sort of logical sequence.

You've been very helpful to me John, and I feel badly going into such gruesome detail but you've been at the ADI forum since the beginning and you probably don't see the utter chaos a first-time user like me sees. It's very disheartening, especially since I know a couple of college students that could produce an excellent FAQ from the data on the site and generally overhaul it for very little money. Hell, they'd probably do it for some ADI equipment to play with.

-- Bobby G.

Ah, I see the problem. You are obviously from the software world. I'm from the hardware world.

I come from an era when we could do just about anything in 16K. In another life we developed a computer graphics adventure game (Powerstar) for the old Atari 8-bit computer. It fit into a 16K cartridge, and included 256 graphic images, text for each location, puzzles, and some animation. While a LONG way from today's graphics, we managed to build each image from roughly 16 bytes of compacted data in a 1/4 second. Several lines of text describing each location cost us another 16 bytes average. The Ocelot has more memory than I will ever need.

Regarding CMax, it is NOT a natural for me. It comes from the industrial automation world, and evolved from relay logic. It is not at all like assembly language programming. Assembly is similar to high level, but without all the structure. It has subroutines, passing multiple parameters, and all that. I did most of my work with Motorola microcontrollers, which have a rich set of instructions, including hardware multiply. The PIC on the other hand is downright archaic. I think it received so much acceptance because it is cheap and simple. Did I say it is CHEAP.

I built industrial automation equipment (another garage operation) for companies that relied on that equipment for their productivity. It had to work non-stop day in and day out. It was a crisis when something broke down. I still remember an early morning I was called into their facility to fix a problem. They said "Your equipment won't indicate continuity!", and placed a clip lead across those inputs to my controller to prove it. I ran a short internal diagnostic, and said "Your clip lead is open." After that they checked their wiring first.

I've participated in the ADI users group for several years, and have had to find things myself. No, it's not Google. But it works.

So, go ahead and get your mini PC and all your high-end GUI stuff. My simple Ocelot and X10 will still be chugging along fine until we finally have to downsize a decade or two from now. It's kind of like the refrigerator. It does what it is designed to do. We never really think about it, but it would be hell to be without it.

Jeff

controllers.

But I get so much more for the same registration fee out of Usenet! :-) And I get green stamps, too!

I suppose. But the talent's out there. Web design is a skill that can be practiced remotely very easily. I don't know what their marketing budget is like but it seems hefty enough to support lots of roadshows. They could hire someone, somewhere to fix simple things like this:

It looks very strange in FireFox and there's no reason to have HTML files listed for download. Then a little proofreading of the articles, removing dead links like those to - just a general tune up. The kind of thing that every halfway decent site needs at least once a year if not two or three times.

It's not just the forums, it's the shabby condition of the website, the haphazard mix of Word documents, HTML, PDF and text files. You just get the feeling you're walking into some time warp. All the documents seem to date to 2002 when ADI's Ocelot/Leopard area of the website seems to have gone into hibernation.

Configuring the Modem 20 Dec 2002 (144K) Driveway Sensor 20 Dec 2002 (144K) Sprinkler Control 20 Dec 2002 (144K) . . .

.> > Considering I can buy a Pentium class mini-ITX for roughly the cost of an

Agreed. There isn't any denying that set-and-forget is better for "autonomous" functions like home control but I've been researching these VIA boxes for a few weeks now. Lots of server-meisters are switching over because the power consumption of the units is so low compared to a standard PC and the reliability appears to be quite good. There are lots of posts describing which flavors of Linux and which builds are the most stable and lots of creative ways of mounting and accessing the boxes.

The really low end (but still quite capable) VIA boards with CPUs sell for $100. At that price and with a low power consumption in the 5-15 watt range you can offload some processing to other units. Keep the HA server simple and use separate media servers and HVAC servers to minimize the impact of a failure or system hang of any one machine.

Oh, I think we both know which is the more likely outcome given the host of issues facing small businesses. I've seen them shuttered because of forced sales due to death of key personnel, dissolution of partnerships, a shift in the company's market strategy, a technologic advance that strands them, buyouts and all sorts of perils. I forget what the failure rate is, but I think it's either 1/3 or 1/2 of all small businesses fail. Wait - I just looked it up since last time I looked was ten years ago:

"The authors concluded that cumulatively 64.2% of the businesses failed in a

10-year period"

You'd better pray your chances of getting hit by a meteor aren't equal!!!

Ever see a product called the "Omni Reader?" They were going great until technology brought forth the flatbed scanner and put them into jack-rabbit quick bankruptcy.

Ocelot no longer bleeds - it's on the trailing edge of the latest HA surge indeed. But proprietary it certainly is. Obscure, too. I would venture that both you and I (and thousands more like us) could sit down at someone else's HA PC and eventually figure out exactly what it was doing, what programs were running and where there might be problems although we had never seen the machine before. That's because we know enough about PC HW and SW to logically decompose the process. I doubt there's 1/1000 the number of people who could sit before an Ocelot and do the same debugging.

It's a danger that simply disappears with the mini-PC option because other manufacturers make similar boxes. Try converting your Ocelot setup to Elk with just a copy of Ghost and a blank DVD-R. When enough servers have been converted from Dell and HP to VIA machines, Intel and AMD might nose into the waters. VIA's been making support chips for a long, long time. They have a proven track record.

With power prices up, 15 watts instead of 150 for people running multiple PC's isn't chump change. The Ocelot consumes less power, true, but try getting it to play a DVD or pipe your front door cam to the wall LCD while simultaneously recording all front door activity and keeping a running log of all home events.

Goldberg-ish

I'm convinced from reading all the posts that I have from server operators that the VIA machines are pretty robust under Linux. They even seem to be stable under W2KPro although I doubt I would use it. Lots of people are writing drivers for the VIA boxes and there's lots of enthusiasm for them because they conserve so much (increasingly) expensive electricity to perform the same tasks nearly as well as their full-sized brothers.

themselves.

Hopefully. But these flaws have been pointed out to them before and not much has changed. Here's but one sample:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- Code Monkey Junior Member Member # 950

Posted August 28, 2004 04:59 AM The forum page could use a little updating. You can have the best product on the planet, but if the place where you are referring your customers to for support looks like it hasn?t been touched in almost a year it doesn?t instill much confidence.

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As I said before. Oy!

-- Bobby G.

Heh, kids today would have no idea what that means. Remember the coupons they used to give out with packs of cigarettes? Fine way to involve the whole family!

Or by a bus while crossing the street.

It's not so much the chips as the OS running on top of them. Often it's just plain more reliable to have NO operating system and just run the app itself on the bare iron. Quite a few appliance-like devices do this. They end up lacking all the other doo-dads you see on an actual OS but at least they stay running.

Hold on, let me juggle those knives, that bowling ball and a chainsaw! One foot, now HOP!

Yes, I agree.

-Bill

Well, that's not exactly true - I build PC's for fun and have built at least

30 of them since 1984 when the clones first hit the market. That was back in the days of the IBM PC (even before the XT!) when you could expect a clone motherboard to have mounting holes that didn't quite match up with the case mounts. PC's represent the fulfilment of the dream of completely interchangeable parts, something that Detroit, the electronics industry and many others have never really achieved. You could take apart 20 PC's made from different "generations" mix the parts and I could reassemble them all because I am so familiar with the parts that make up PC's and the "epochs" they represent. EISA, ISA, PCI, PCI-E, SCSI I,II,II, LVDS, AGP 1-8X, SIMMS, DIMMS, 16K memory chips, 1GB DDR pairs, flip chips, etc, etc. There's nothing that makes me happier than taking someone's castoff PC and rebuilding it into something useful like a HW firewall.

Yes - if you start from that kind of background you're naturally going to be very thrifty with your memory. My first IBM PC came with 16K on the motherboard and BASIC on a ROM. I wince when I see how much space an OS like XP required. But I keep seeing people asking in the forum about when ADI is going to boost the memory in the Leopard. That leads me to believe my use of memory would be more like theirs than yours. It's also a reason why I find C-MAX so frustrating. There are so many times I want to do something with a procedure call, or pass a parameter or use a case statement and there's no easy way to do it. It's really as far away from structured programming as you can get and still call it programming.

I recall someone working very hard on a compiler for C-MAX a few years back where a high level language could be used to write code and the compiler would then take those instructions and turn them into C-MAX code. I'm not sure what happened to it. The HomeSeer option looked good for a while, but it still requires a PC running 24/7 so it seemed somewhat pointless to have an Ocelot if you need a PC running all the time to command it.

Agreed. It *was* cheap - much cheaper than any PC-based solution when it first appeared (at least 10 years ago, I'm guessing, probably longer). But now a fully loaded mini-PC weighs in at the same cost, a little bit larger size, a little bit greater power consumption and outrageously greater capabilities. The cost savings that were obvious before are no longer quite so clear. Now ADI's main claim to fame is reliability.

My shopping list for new ADI equipment was approaching the $900 mark before I decided to investigate other options. The fact that nothing changed on the ADI website since I looked four years ago really made me nervous. I don't want to run the risk of running my house on what turns out to be an HA version of Betamax. I think ADI also realizes that the playing field has changed in HA and lots of people require more horsepower than the Ocelot can deliver. I can't help but think that's one of the reasons Dan Boone left. He realized the Ocelot line isn't nearly as cost-effective as it once was and that time might be running out for it. On the other hand, HA in general keeps getting closer and closer to being a mainstream product.

:-) It's *always* a crisis when things break down. That's why, in another message, I said I might break down the HA tasks into chunks that can be processed by multiple PCs so that if I have fault, it doesn't bring down the entire house. I'm going to have to be very careful with the design. As I noted elsewhere, though, a set of spares for an ADI setup is a box of equipment that has no other use. A set of spares for a mini-PC based system can actually be used as a PC testbench for SW, etc. until it's needed for a swap out.

I hope you'll taken into account the fact that you've been working with that forum for years now - you've followed it from when there were very few posts. I've been trying to illustrate just how chaotic and out-of-date it seems to newcomers. Calling a list of the most recently asked questions a FAQ is just bogus. Call it a an EDQEA - "Every Damn Question Ever Asked" (in no particular order!)

Yes, the forum is what it is, and it's hard to use - although not impossible, but cleaning out dead links and announcements for years gone by doesn't require a SuperWebMan, it just requires attention to detail. Churning through all the posts and creating a *proper* FAQ doesn't require fantastic web programming skills, it requires a little hard work. Worse, still, it's not as if the "website suggestions" forum isn't chock full of these same sorts of comments. All in all, these little items, when added up, projects a sense that they don't much care about the product anymore. Maybe that's a good thing in the PIC world. No changes means no issues with version control!

The problem for me is it *can't* do what I want it to do. It's deaf to RF, it's impossible to maintain intellectual control over the program (at least for me) because C-MAX programs seem to grow like Topsy and it's pretty expensive when you compare what's in an Ocelot box to what's in a Mini-ITX PC. The problem I see is that if they can't attract new customers, they really can't sustain operations. Others disagree, but I see the moribund website and the lack of any new components in three years as very telling signs that the interests of the people making the Ocelot have moved elsewhere.

As for OS's, "we don't need no stinkin' GUI!" I grew up with DOS and Unix. I'm probably more comfortable than most people with nothing but a C: prompt staring me in the face. I wouldn't have made this decision without the tremendous groundswell of support for Linux, particularly on small boxes like the VIA's. As you said before, I would *never* trust an MS Windows product if I hoped to even approach the levels of reliability that the Ocelot offers.

-- Bobby G.

I understand your point a lot better now.

But, PCs aren't quite that interchangeable. I've got a box full of ISA boards that won't plug into any current motherboard. I do use the only P5 motherboard I could find that still accepted an ISA board. Then there is the continuing evolution of harddrive interfaces. Don't forget the ATX update that rendered the old cases obsolete. Yes, we can plug that junk back together an get a running obsolete computer. Why?

Jeff

It's Old Geek Code. I still have a GE vacuum in service paid for in green stamps (it was that well made it's lasted well over 30 years). Now you're lucky if a gas station has a bucket and a squeegee for you to wipe your own windshield.

The family that smokes together, chokes together. I had forgotten all about the ciggie coupons.

One of the dead links on ADI's website points to the defunct futurestandard.com site. An ironic reminder of the high mortality rate of new small businesses!

It's not impossible to keep well made, well-powered (UPS w/auto-shutdown) and well-cooled PC's going for long periods of time if you set them up properly and don't overload them or feed them too much M$ stuff.

The mini-PC that's going to take the place of the Ocelot in my design will mostly control relays and talk to Dave's BXAHT and the powerline. AV and phones will be handled via a different PC because those are the apps most likely to blow up for some obscure reason. With WOL and other options that are standard in the PC HW, it should work out quite nicely and very cost-effectively both for the equipment and the cost of operation.

But it's no big thing for me if I have to remote reboot the AV server from time to time or even if it fails and requires occasional tweaking. The alarm system is completely separate as well, handled by an OmniLT. The HVAC part is still up in the air because it depends a lot on what kind of heating and cooling goes into the next house.

I noticed that HomeSeer is selling a Mini-ITX (For about $2K, IIRC) to run their SW. Sign of the times, indeed!

I've been reading about folks in CA (where electric bills apparently soar during the summer) who have small server farms at home that have cut $300+ from their monthly bills. One guy said he knew he had to do something when his electric bill got bigger than his T-1 charges. So that's a lot of smart people whose PC needs include long periods of uptime putting these babies through their paces.

I frankly couldn't be happier if VIA and Linux ate big holes in Intel and MS's profits. Maybe then they'll even start listening to the consumer again. HA Har!

It's also clear that VIA listens and watches intensely and makes very quick modifications based on user feedback and requirements. I like that. They've even come out with a dual CPU Mini although I can't see how. The one CPU board is so crowded they have to resort to space saving tricks like mounting the RTC/CMOS battery vertically!

-- Bobby G.

The one I've been using for several years is the MSI Pro4 MS-6391.

I have it in two systems. But, given the lifetime of this stuff, it's probably obsolete and discontinued by now.

Jeff

I challenge you to name something similar that's *more* interchangeable! They are the most universally interchangeable commodity that I know of. Maker A's board usually runs in Maker B's PC without problems. Try that with home automation equipment from Z-wave, ZigBee, Centralite, HAI, X-10, Insteon, and on and on. For a while it was stabilized quite nicely with lots of different manufacturers adhering to the X-10 protocol, but Babel has come to HA.

Well, I'd have a hard time plugging radio tubes into these teensy IC sockets! Should there never be any progress? You could take those cards and plug them into any motherboard that still has an ISA slot and they would work. You could sit all day in front of a Z-Wave switch with an X-10 controller and not get anywhere. That's what I am talking about when I say interchangeable. Maker A's board works with maker B's computer.

There have to be allowances for architectural advances. In the PC world, when the ISA bus became too slow, the PCI bus (and for a short while, the EISA bus) took its place. You could take virtually any PCI card from manufacturer A and stick it in any PCI slot from manufacturer B and it would work. Let's compare that situation with home automation.

Like ISA, the X-10 bus has *almost* run out of gas. Instead of moving from one standard to another, we have at least 6 competing standards on the market now with very little interchangeability. Then there's the AV market where devices all have proprietary remotes, S-Links, etc. When you get to automobiles, about the only parts that you can interchange between makers are batteries, lamps and fuses and some fluids. SLR cameras had only a flash shoe, a tripod socket and a film size that was standardized. Everything else was "manufacturer's choice." There would be no mounting Canon lenses on Nikon bodies with adapters that usually did not support all the features of either the lens or the camera.

The key word is evolution. When we jumped from ATA33 to ATA133 tremendous efforts were made to keep things backward compatible. You could install a new controller in your old PC to run the new drives easily *because* the PCI bus had long been standardized. I've done it many times as the various HD size barriers were crossed. Now almost all new boards come with both PATA and SATA drive connectors to ease the transition to ATA150, just as there was a time when motherboards came with both ISA and PCI slots - to ease the transition. So far only Dave Houston and Smarthome appear to have given any thought to interoperability among HA equipment.

There isn't any consumer product that's nearly as standardized as desktop PCs. Interestingly enough, for a long time there was chaos reigning in the laptop arena because each maker made their own disk drives, memory strips, batteries, etc. It's gotten a little better because competitively, you can build better and cheaper if you standardize and are able to source parts from more than one supplier.

The ATX standard was SUCH an improvement over the old cases with the "wire by hand" rat's nest of ribbon cables and pin headers that most PC people were quite happy to get rid of the old cases. Reliability shot up tremendously as a result of attaching all the I/O connectors to the motherboard. It should be noted that ASUS did make boards that fit into either style case for a time - once again to ease the transition. I still own two and they are still working hard as general purpose PC's. If the case PS dies I can move the board to an ATX style. There's nothing else I can think of that's so adaptable.

FWIW, the ATX standard has changed slightly again with the addition of a separate 4 wire cable to supply power directly to the PC. This had to be added because CPU's got so powerful they began drawing more current than the original power supply spec provided for. But that's a good thing, not a bad one because it's easy to buy and mount a new PS in an ATX case. Why? They're standardized! Four screws and that PS is outta there.

Because some very specialized apps require ISA. I have an old SLT laptop connected to a RatShack digital multimeter, turning an old piece of "junk" into quite a powerful and useful data recorder. Another one's working as a firewall and others do intermittent service as RS-232 terminals, etc. Still another had a specialized digital audio capture board to connect to my Sony DAT recorder. ISA only. My X-10 CP290 won't talk to anything new-fangled, either!

I have, however, scrapped all my 486's full sized PC's, only because I have enough old laptops and other PC's to more than cover my needs.

-- Bobby G.

Comparing X-10 and Z-Wave is like comparing a PC with a Mac. They both do the same thing, but there's not much compatibility. Even today, stay within X10 (or Leviton DHC), and everything works fine. It's perhaps even more compatible than the PC because those old brown BSR X10 modules still work today. They come into service every year at Christmas candle time. There aren't many parts left over from my XT that are useful today. Anybody want an ATI Wonder card?

Jeff

(much other stuff snipped)

"Jeff Volp" wrote

It's funny you should make that analogy at this moment. Macs and PCs have been on a convergence path for a long time now. It started with SCSI and then moved to PCI and USB. This month, they made the transformation complete and switched to Intel CPUs!

The official reason was speed and heat but the real reason was that they got sole-source throttled by IBM who was not giving them the supply of chips they wanted. In essence, the need for interchangeability forced them to do it.

AMD and VIA can make Pentium-class CPUs so there are other options if Intel tries to throttles them like IBM did. Add to that all the businesses that really couldn't justify maintaining two whole different support staffs, HW, training and everything else that comes with a dual standard and it was inevitable. That means, in essence, there's really only one CPU architecture left for desktop computing. That's pretty bloody standardized!!

WinTel machines were moving towards Apple as Apple was moving towards them. MS stole all the GUI parts that made Apple so different in the early years from the same place Apple did. :-) The just got around to using it a little later. That's remarkable convergence compared to the utter Babel of the home automation world where no one player has emerged as a market leader, except, maybe for X-10.

-- Bobby G.

Ah, but this stuff often gets a second or third life cycle on Ebay. I've seen ten year old equipment go for more than it cost new. In some cases the cost of switching to a different HW and SW platform is so great that full list for a 10 year old card is often a super deal!

-- Bobby G.

"Jeff Volp" wrote

An All in Wonder card? I'll take it! :-) The point you raise is interesting. X-10 didn't modify the underlying technology of its PLC protocol - but they did do an awful lot in both in the RF arena and with the CM11A as an automation controller that didn't need a PC. The CM11A was a technological extension of the CP290 - IIRC they hit a design wall in their design that make it unworkable on Win95 systems. BTW, I find my CP290 far more reliable than the CM11A! So there's been steady progress on the X-10 front, even though it may not seem that way. If there's no pressing need to update the standard, it lingers until there is a reason to change or until it's no longer needed.

Floppy drive cables haven't changed in 20 years - nor have floppy ports or parallel printer ports or keyboard ports or mouse ports. Sure there are more options today with USB, but those ports are still there, relatively unchanged because there was no pressing need to change them.

I think Insteon and other have arrived on the scene at this moment for a reason: The proliferation of CFL's and other signal suckers has finally rendered the X-10 protocol more likely to fail than to succeed in a first time deployment by a new enthusiast. We see evidence of that here in CHA all the time. The technological issue of a polluted power line finally triggered the burst of new protocols. The same "we've hit a wall and must redesign" process occurs in the PC world, but about every 5 years, not every

30 as in home automation.

-- Bobby G.

All good points. Another of the reason it's taken so long is the X10 patent that pretty much kept everybody else out of the biz. X10, even in the early days had a lot of signal integrity problems which is why it never became a mainstream product like an iPOD. X10 has certainly sold a lot of product but most people have still never really heard of it.

From:Robert Green ROBERT snipped-for-privacy@YAH00.COM