Dedicated Z-wave sites?

I suspect that's true for both of us, Dean. Your product is advertised as media friendly. I would expect the vast majority of people coming to you to be looking for a media friendly product. Likewise, I advertise specific products with specific, well-known capabilities. As such, the universe I see is actually a subset of the true universe. The same is true for you.

Another factor contributing to our diverse experiences is manufacturer and industry group promotion. We both see lots of ads in trade rags (or at least I do) promoting media servers as the be-all and end-all of HA. For those who build such systems and for those who sell them, perhaps it is. However, for a very significant portion of the HA market (neither of us can be certain what percentage it is) media control and distribution is irrelevant.

Reply to
Robert L Bass
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That bolsters the case for Homeplug. Their 2000Mbps Homeplug AV can do the media and the new (slower) Homeplug Command & Control can do the rest.

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I don't know but suspect HPCC will be competitive in price with Z-Wave, UPB and maybe even Insteon. It will work worldwide and is retrofittable so the size of the market should help with economies of scale.

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Reply to
Dave Houston

Perhaps because they see that market as being far more lucrative. Being able to gouge $900 for software alone, or provide utterly no way for end-users to program the systems, makes them much more money. And in the process fails to build the momentum for enconomy of scale price reductions. But if they can make beaucoup dinero by gouging a small audience... PROFIT!

There's also the usability factor. I think that since the HA market has been so fragmented (for all manner of reasons) there's been little in the way of 'guarantees' for successful implementations. Successful in the "not annoy the crap out of the users" perspective. Far too few of the offerings on the market really get anywhere near decent usability. All too often they're relegated to being solely a gadget lover's (masochistic) dream. So integrated them all together has been nigh on impossible.

So it's a market of extremes. Either low-end, drive the wife crazy, or high-end empty-your-wallet pricey. With little in-between that actually works in ways anyone would dare torment the spouse into using.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

I couldn't agree more, Bill. However, there are a few bright lights in the field. One is Dean's CQC product. He has built a very configurable system with the capability of high WAF ratings. The catch is that the buyer must do considerable configuration. There's a longer learning curve for CQC than most of the "packaged" solutions. For the true geek, that's like a red flag to a bull -- a challenge that must be met. For the average homeowner, I suspect it may be *appear* to be too much.

None of the above is meant as a slight to CQC or Dean. I expect his product to continue to grow in popularity among true HA aficionados. To make it a major financial success he might need to add some easy to use wizards. Idiot-proofing has its benefits, no? :^)

As companies like ELK Products merge media with solid HA platforms we'll likely see more end user acceptance. The decision to integrate the M1G with Russound's multi-room entertainment systems is a step in the right direction. As soon as that's done I plan to ask them to add Xantech to the mix. Unfortunately, very few of the HA manufacturers seem to be as willing to accommodate dealer and end-user wishes as ELK is.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

This is shameful, purposeful mischaracterization. I searched the cite for the word "planning". Here's where it comes up in the context Dave refers to:

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" ZWW: Just how big is the Z-Wave world today? How many companies are making products or are planning to? How many products are on the market? MW: Today the Z-Wave world is just getting started, with many companies planning their product launches for the fall season of 2006. There are over

100 different companies with product development underway and over 60 fully interoperable products on the shelves in the United States. These numbers will more than double in the next year. "

As I understand it, there are more than 40 companies shipping products. ACT-solutions, who came up with a line of improved x-10 (A-10 ) hardware before they gave up on X-10 lists more than 40 individual products

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all by itself ~ 25 of which are apparently shipping
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New technology startup is difficult. Look at how long it took for Bluetooth to become established. Now, as Bobby recently remarked in this newsgroup, it is everywhere (despite our naysayer).

Another example is HD Radio. There are more than 1100 stations broadcasting in HD digital, but receivers are scarce after years of broken promises on shipping dates. There is _no_ affordable component tuner shipping last I checked and nothing with a digital output for less than ~$2000 A table-top unit I ordered 1-1/2 years ago that was going to ship the following month is still not shipping last I checked. Those station represent > $100,000,000 investment that as yet has provided negligible benefit except buzz.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

Dean,

I think there are other limitations.

As you have confirmed, getting timely ACKs from even a small Z-Wave installation is problematic. The reason is explained in a Brian Dye post. He got a Z-Wave engineer to answer some of the technical questions that I raised.

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"The Z-Wave Protocol supports 4 hops, so in a best case scenario it would take some 250ms for the command to get there and a further 250ms for the confirmation to get back. The actual time taken will depend on whether any back-offs and retransmission were necessary along the way due to collisions/lost frames (from other Z-Wave communication, or from other RF noise or interference)."

The poor RF range plus the 4 hop limit means networks must be relatively concentrated. And in a less than best case scenarion, the 1/2 second round-trip time will be much longer.

Another problem is all Z-WAve devices are RF repeaters. Switches installed in metal boxes are going to have limited range compared to the already low range caused by the FCC 1mW limit on output power. Brian Dye also made note of this.

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"Metal boxes can be a real pain when working with Zwave."

People who do not understand how the mesh network and routing tables work (or who are deliberately trying to confuse the issue) might propose adding high power repeaters. They would violate FCC power limits and would totally screw the network.

And people unfamiliar with Z-Wave (or who are deliberately trying to confuse the issue) might see the limited range as a plus, arguing that it prevents interference from neighbors. But, the fact is, Z-Wave already protects against unintentional cross-talk by encrypting transmissions so that neighboring systems cannot casually interfere (intentional interference is another matter).

There is one thing that still mystifies me. You have said that a user of your software reported very long range outdoors. Brian Dye has also reported similar free air range. The thread that I cited from someone in the UK using modules purchased in the US reported 30-40 feet _OUTDOORS_. I wonder whether early modules sold here may have been quickly modified European designs putting out 25mW as is allowed in Europe?

On the plus side (for you), many of the new Z-Wave products are little more than glorified remote extenders, like those that have been around for years, but they are HT and media oriented.

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Reply to
Dave Houston

Unfortunately, that is also very much in character. Dave has made it a habit to deliberately misconstrue, misrepresent and (not too infrequently), to tell outright lies. His vicious personal attack on me came in response to an offer of assistance at a time when he had been asking for help. I have no room for hatred, even for Dave Houston. However, any respeect he might have garnered by posting some helpful information was forfeited due to his dishonesty.

Mr Houston gives useful advice on certain subjects but he spouts nonsense in other areas where he has little or no experience. His continuing attacks on Z-Wave are but one example.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

If you look at AVSForum, the A/V Distribution section has 8 times as many posts as the automation section (and they are mostly populated by the same folks and are in the same major sectio of the forum.)

I just searched the Custom Installer forum at RemoteCentral, where mainly professionals hang out, and searched first for 'audio' for the last year and then for 'security'. Audio got 1200+ threads. Security got 212.

Anecdotal of course, but informative.

Reply to
Dean Roddey

the field. One is Dean's CQC product.

You missed the $900 gouge part, eh?

Yes, but at least the end-user CAN do this. It's a tough call, crappy featureset, complicated to configure or held hostage solely by an "installer". Not really customer-friendly choices but such is the HA market.

Doubling the price seems more likely to scare them off. This is probably a "good thing" from the perspective of unit costs and baiting "dealers" or "professional installers" to get into the mix. But ya gotta pay the mortgate somehow, right?

Reply to
Bill Kearney

Informative of what? That the A/V oriented fora you suggested focus more on (gasp!) media applications and not HA or security? Puh-leeze, if you're going to make that argument (and I think it's one worth making) at least use realistic numbers and relevant sources.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

The Custom Installer Lounge section of RemoteCentral isn't A/V oriented at all. I don't know of any other place out there online where more CIs hang out.

Reply to
Dean Roddey

I've worked for almost five years now for almost nothing (average of less than $10K a year, while spending over $40K of my own money, which was all I had, and another $40K of Mark's money.) It will probably be another four before I could even begin to consider buying a house so that I could even have a mortage to pay, and moving out of this tiny, one bedroom apartment and stop having to work 7x12x365. So I find your statements a little insulting, as if you somehow think we are doing this so that we can buy a second summer home or something.

This is a low volume business, and if we don't get into the professional market, it will have been a waste of time because we cannot possibly surivive otherwise. And that means we have to meet the most important needs of the professional market, and that includes not having a huge disparity between the DIY and pro prices.

Reply to
Dean Roddey

I haven't visited in quite some time but I recall a lot of Crestron, AMX, Vantage and Lutron installers. Hardly A/V or alarm oriented. ;-)

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Reply to
Dave Houston

Interesting, too. If I'm wrong about this maybe I'd better start pushing an ELK/CQC combo pack. :^)

Of course, it will still need to incorporate Z-Wave and/or UPB since those are better than X10 and usually easier to retrofit than hard-wired solutions.

All kidding aside, are you interested in possibly "tag team" marketing a hardware/software HA package?

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Hmm. CQC is $900 or something else is?

How useful a feature set is, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Im'm sure there are things which I consider essential that you would consider superfluous and vice versa.

As to paid installers, I have little or no interest in them. Some are talented and honest but far too many are of the sort from the "other" newsgroup that regularly pollute this one. Very few have both the technical skill and the personal integrity to get my endorsement.

I haven't followed Dean's pricing. I believe he mentioned something recently about an upcoming price hike and that one should consider taking the leap now rather than after the new price goes into effect (or was that someone else's post). Without knowing how much time Dean has spent developing CQC and how much support time the average user requires, I can't say whether I consider his price high, reasonable or cheap. Market forces will likely make that assessment for him better than I can anyway.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

talented and honest but far too many are of the sort from the

technical skill and the personal integrity to get my

I see it still bothers you that you can't get an electrical license in FL because of your unfortunate criminal record. Gee that's too bad.

Reply to
Frog

See, I, for one, am hesitant to hire people who proclaim "I am a licensed electrician!" I've seen way too many "licensed electricians" befuddled by a three way circuit or a switch-leg. I also know somoene.. great guy, good friend of mine. Dumb as a brick. Passed the licensing exam, can't strip a wire without knicking it and doesn't understand why that's bad.

I therefor have no respect for the license, and a lot of respect for experience. YMMV.

Reply to
E. Lee Dickinson

I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, but the way it usually works is that if you're good enough, eventually one of the big boys will either buy your company or steal your product and use their enormous corporate treasure chest to give away enough of their product to eventually capture meaningful market share. If you're not good enough, you'll keep doing what you're doing until you burn out and then you'll get a day job! (-:

The problem is you have to have a *lot* of users to support the true cost of programming (your efforts). Raise the price to more equitably compensate yourself and a lot of people who might have taken a look at $450 would think a long time about spending twice that. I don't know where the magic price point is, but I've seen custom programs for several very different industries, priced in the $1-3K, eventually sputter and fail because they had just enough users to make every incompatibility unique, but not enough to gain any economies of scale for all the troubleshooting time. The enviroment is also getting more and more complicated with so many versions of Windows to support. IIRC, each one of those failed companies died shortly after a major new OS was introduced. A specialized program like yours takes all the incompatibility hits, deserved or not, and you end up troubleshooting a lot of problems that aren't yours.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

I think Zigbee's got the better chance for the same reason VHS beat Beta. More capacity. Beta tapes came in some god-awful fractional format and VHS tape came in 120, 160 and 180's and it was easy to know what that meant in recording times. Two hours at SP, six hours at EP. The slightly longer VHS blanks could always record one more show the Beta counterparts. When the Video Rental Wars began, customer preference for format didn't matter as much as not having to stock duplicate inventory and the Beta faded away. It will be interesting to see who wins the HiDef DVD wars.

It's well on the way if it's not there yet. I keep pulling RG-59, power cables, CAT5 and doing all sorts of things that will eventually be obsolete just to pipe TV and audio images from many sources, including CATV and CCTV. The future will be lots of flea-powered devices running off ethernet cables, hooking together by stacks of hubs and switches. A smart wall switch can have all the sensors I mentioned elsewhere, and probably a lot more, if it's designed at the chip level and components share power supplies. Everything a sensor and switch does can be translated into digital data. Every sound and video signal you want to send can be digitized as well. The interesting issue to me is how much DRM and things like HDMI connectors will screw up people's ability to watch and listen to what they want anywhere in the house. I think it's going to be a lot worse than many people realize.

Ethernet's already there because network cards cost $5 and 8 port hubs $10. Once a network topology becomes established at a price point like that, almost nothing else can compete. It's partly because a lot of cable jockeys know how to string it. It's partly because there's a testable standard that has to be met and pros have the tools to do it. You may have two or more networks in the house. Lots of techies do. Red cable for HA, blue cable for PC's. A bridge of some sorts if, for some reason, you want them talking to each other. Just because they use the same topology doesn't mean PCs and HA gear HAS to live on the same wires.

HomePlug is quite fast enough. I'm not sure how it would handle HA thrown into the mix but it's clear to me the powerline's not dead yet. Homeplug would always worry me because I'd be subject to anything the power company might inject into the lines upstream.

As my wife has often remarked - "why does this wireless gear have more wires coming into than the wired stuff?" A single CAT6 cable probably has less negative SAF than a device with a wall wart that's always sucking power, that's probably blocking two outlets on a power strip and has to have some piece out in the open with an antenna showing.

Which is why Red Cable for HA, Blue for PC. Handling communications through a bridge would seem to be one way to limit the potential insanity of plugging a smart TV or other ethernet-smart device into your home data network.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

We are primarily targeting the professional market. In that market, our product is quite competitive price-wise, though the benefits tend to only kick in once you get the system up out of the very small sized system. The reason being that we can't scale our product down really low price-wise, but you can scale it up for a very reasonable cost due to the very high power of very reasonably priced hardware these days.

In this we are actually in a very good position. We use very few system services. We have now over 700,000 lines of proprietary code and we do as much as possible ourselves. This is why if you read our forum we have very little of the stuff you see on many fora, where people complain that they installed something and the product stopped working. Of the couple of high level features we use, a media player wrapper is one, and we had a little growing pains with that initial implementation. But mostly we just aren't too troubled with this kind of thing. We'll certainly have to do a little tweaking for Vista, due to their changed security implementation, but it shouldn't be a huge deal. The product currently runs on XP, XP Home, W2K Server, and W3K Server unchanged.

We have a couple of 'virtual kernel' modules and all system services are encapsulated inside them (a core one, a windowing one, and a couple for some specialized bits like ODBC.) Everything else is completely built on top of that virtual kernel, and not even any system or language runtime headers are visible outside of them. This provides us with a lot of flexibility to deal with changes in the OS.

--------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

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