[SOLVED] CM11A gets 'stuck' (and fix)

I'll have to do more work on that then. If that's the way they are handling it I should give them a fair chance.

Back on the issue of Insteon. I've made a proposal to Insteon to provide a support forum to the Open Source community:

I'll be supporting any effort but not getting support from Insteon. I'm not going to limit it to just Linux. Lets see how well this works. I've asked Insteon very specific questions that I won't detail here. I also need to look at their most recent Developers Licence Agreement.

Hmm, this will be interesting my contact at Insteon is no longer there. Looks like I have more work to do.

Yes, and HPIB (aka IEEE-488) continued and continues to quietly make money for HP, NI and others for years. I expect that the fact that it did not become a commodity was and is quite to their liking. Ditto for HPIL (although HP-specific). Factoid: Used, current model GPIB USB interfaces sell for ca $300 on eBay.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Hello Marc,

Sure they do but there is no market volume to speak of. I vividly remember a discussion at Tektronix when nearly all attending users (myself included) voiced something loud and clear: Get us a regular run-of-the-mills method for data output and not GPIB. Then they did that.

BTW, in the days when I had to use GPIB there were ways to get around HP and NI's high prices. I forgot the name of the company (Plug-In or something similar, out of Taiwan) that sold PC-mount HPIB interfaces. For the slower grade which was fine for everything I did we paid around $60. In the early 90's that wasn't much more than we had to pay for a regular multi-IO card. So the cost issue could be circumvented but I really had it when one of those garden hose type GPIB cables slipped out of the socket a bit fast and flung my favorite coffee mug to the ground. Coffee and shards all over the lab. Luckily I drink mine sugarless.

Nowadays you can buy a GPIB converter kit or assembled board from someone in eastern Europe. It has a uC (MSP430, IIRC) on board, resides in the connector shell and converts to USB. That gets rid of the bulky cables. But we don't use GPIB in the lab anymore.

I used some Ziatech ISA IEEE-488 ca 1987. So there have been lower-priced work-arounds from the git-go. The hassle was the drivers which allowed software vendors to dictate the interface hardware.

FWIW, they are almost _giving_ away ISA DAQ hardware on eBay, with PCI prices not much higher. 16-input, 16-bit resolution ISA ADC/DAC/DIO and

96-input/output DIO PCI boards for $50, and so on.

One feller had about fifteen like-new National Instruments 64-input ADC (+ DIO + DAC) that went without any takers at $40. He was begging for offers. Plenty of single-board ISA and PCI computers (SBC's) usually too.

I'll be having a porch sale soon at

to clean out the junk box/room.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Hello Marc,

Thanks for the hint. That sure is a better deal than a Labjack although those are quite universal and useful. Different league though.

Let us know when that happens.

Nice house. I really like that winter picture. My grandmother in Germany wouldn't have considered 1821 to be that long ago. Her house (still there) is a lot older. The church where we got married was dedicated in

1019 but rebuilt several times because of lots of wars, fires and lightning hits. But even that ain't old. There are lots of building from the Romans still intact or even in use. The ones I saw were mostly about 1800 years old. These guys sure knew how to do a top quality job.

Here's a url of a picture taken (literally) from the upstairs of the house I grew up in and still own and visit on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, Spain:

That's the new (18th century?) church in the picture. The terraces built on the mountainside were built by the Moors ca 1000. Our house is contiguous with the palace of the Kings of Mallorca begun in 1390-something and finished about 1405 IIRC. Famous too for a monastery also built in the 13-14th C's, also contiguous with our house.

My first HA project involved chiseling in the meter-thick stone walls of my bedroom to embed wires ... Folks what complain about the 'difficulty' of pulling CAT5 through hollow stud walls in US and Canada have no idea how easy they have it ;-)

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Hello Marc,

Nice! The Maurs were also great builders, as were the Egyptians and Chinese. Just imagine who it must have taken just to get all the stuff there. No trucks, no roads to speak of, no Home Depot in those days.

Yep, done that, too. In Germany. Drilling a hole from first floor to second could take a whopping 15 minutes. Or a lot more if you hit a pebble in the concrete. In my days there I did not have a Bosch Bulldog so it was all hand-chiseling.