XTB - the Future of X10 has arrived!

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I hear the "dumb human" argument more than I care to with respect to Windows.

Last year, my wife was shopping for of an "upscale" sewing machine. In the process, she was getting the dog and pony show for a Windows based machine. In the middle of the demo, the screen froze up, and the machine quit. The young lady giving the demo informed her that "since it's a computer, it locks up from time to time, so you just unplug it, then plug it back in". I think its pretty bad that many people (or maybe even most), think that this is normal, and expected. I also don't know what kind of a "dumb human" thing might have caused this. (Maybe somebody installed the wrong video driver ?).

An yes, there is such a machine (I couldn't even make something like this up) see

The PC I'm using right now runs XP Professional. I recently installed an XP update (actually an auto-update) , and Word quit running, so I had to go to the MS web site, and spend a hour fixing Word. Perhaps I did something wrong, when I checked the "install update" checkbox, but I think the problem is more likely the low quality of the software.

My $0.02.

-Hershel

You are probably never going to 'do security' on the PC anyway. As a practical matter, the core security features are likely always going to be on some other piece of hardware in order to get it blessed by insurance companies so that you can get your discount on your home owner's insurance and all that. The only part of security that happens on the PC is the interfacing to the security system, and presentation of the security status and such on touch screens, and the ability to arm/disarm. But in order to meet the necessary requirements, there will probably always be a dedicated keypad of some sort for the security system that you can use as a fallback in the worst case scenario.

So I think that this is a bit of a strawman argument.

It doesn't appear magically, but you certainly don't have to be logged onto the server in order to get it there. The data will be shared out via driver shares as a practical matter, and you can use the same thing to get the data into it. For movies it will pretty much always be on a separate RAID drive array anyway, if not on a NAS, so you aren't going to somehow fill up the OS partition by ripping files to the server remotely.

But, as I said, we made a network distributed system for many reasons, and one of them is so that you can choose how to distribute the stuff how you want. If want a medium strength machine for the overall centralized HA server and then a manly machine beside it to act as the media server, then it's not a problem and we support that inherently out of the box. You could put the media server machine anywhere and it's equally accessible, such as in the theater room or theater room closet rack.

But music is so light weight an operation for a modern machine (meaning either playback of a few streams locally on that machine via a multi-channel card, or streaming of that data off the disc to other players around the house), that it's really not a practical problem. We are working with the Zoom Player guys to create a service based multi-player program so that the playback all happens in the background without anyone logged on, and each of the internal players in the app an be assigned to a different audio card output.

But you can certainly move that off to a separate machine if that's desired.

You mean wireless or wired? For something like a home theater, you can hard mount something like a 7" Lilliput touch screen between the chair arms (or on a table beside the couch) on a swivel mount for a couple hundred bucks. If you mean wired, then the new UMPC boxes are probably the best bet (though currently still untested, by us at least), and they should start getting pretty reasonable by the end of the year and into next year. Even now, at $1000, as long as they work well, they will be quite competitive with proprietary touch screens from folks like Crestron.

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

I understand why Dean was making it. From his perspective, he's probably had support issues that turned out to be caused by people loading garbage on their machines. My experience has been that even a newly born Windows PC with very little installed software can lock up for no immediately discernable reason. Again, as Dean pointed out, Windows is expected to run on a very, very wide range of platforms, so driver issues and minor incompatibilities are the inevitable result. MS's kitchen-sink design philosophy doesn't help matters, either.

Thanks for very cogently demonstrating the point I was trying to make about "expectations." People just assume Windows machines are going to lock up. There's an infamous example that's probably still circulating on the net called "What if Microsoft made cars, not Windows" and goes on to detail what you might expect from such a transition. Here are the first few:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

We believed you, honest! My wife still uses her model 66 Singer treadle machine manufactured in 1925 because she likes the exercise. There have been a few issues over the years, but I expect it to reach 100 years old and still be able to sew.

Lots and lots of people aren't happy with MS's update procedures, including me. The reports of the fixes making things stop working is so well known that IT support people call MS patch days "Black Tuesdays" because they know that crashes are not far behind.

Here are the rest of the "If MS made cars" paragraphs:

1. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

1. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five percent of the roads.

2. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.

1. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

2. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

1. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

2. Oh yeah, and last but not least . . . you'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off!

-- Bobby G.

Here he be ;-) But I don't recall saying anything about qualifications for designing HA SW. Correcting the record so that those not blinded by Cupid are not mislead is a different matter. (Read on.)

What does this mean?

More expandable than what? There is no practical limit to the "expansion" via TCP/IP including TCP/IP -->RS-xxx. Course "network" may be a more useful concept than "expansion" here ....

Gentle comp.home.automation participants not infatuated with a particular XY dimension of motherboards from a particular manufacturer might want to know that what Bobby is just now imagining has in fact been available for years:

1)Dual-slot PCI extenders have been available for years from a number of different sources including one distributed by VIA for the mini-ITX since the get-go (see my previous post on the 6-7 different geometries/options). 2) A 'mini-ITX with more slots' is a micro-ATX which has been available for a decade. The micro-ATX I've been using not only has three PCI slot but an ISA slot and on-board ethernet, video, audio in/mic/out, IDE, floppy, USB, RS-232 serial, printer, game, PS2 mouse, PS2 keyboard, etc.

Intel introduced the ATX and mini-ATX with integrated peripherals in 1995 and there have been many, many different manufacturers of ATX, mini-ATX and micro-ITX motherboards since. Bob by's previous assertion that VIA is uniquely positioned to make integrated motherboards is beyond hyperbole and well into the realm of hippo-speak.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult www.ECOntrol

Just for the record...

One big reason our product is so good is because we are software people and not automation people. In many cases the best products come from people are really into something and then implement a great product based on their own knowledge as a user of such things. But when you are talking about software on the scale required for this type of product, if you don't have the hard core software engineering skills, no amount of knowledge of the problem domain will help.

You obviously do need someone who knows the problem domain, but your customers are of those types of people and they can tell you what needs to be done. What you need as the implementer is very strong software engineering skills in order to make it so. OTOH, if you already know a lot about the problem domain and less about software engineering, your customers cannot tell you how to write the software.

I guess it also has the benefit of us never telling our customers, no that's wrong and we know more about automation than you do and know we are right. We don't know more about automation than our customers and we know that and therefore we have no ego tied up in doing it this way or that. We are happy to do what can be done within the practical limitations of what we can accomplish, if that's what our customers need.

OTOH, we know very well what we can and cannot do (or should not do for strategic software reasons), and we know that the software is the only reason we are here and won't risk its long term stability and robustness for a quick buck, and end up with a piece of junk in the long term. I think that this is too often the case when the people running the company just know the problem domain, or business, and consider the actual product something to be jerked around as required to make money as fast as possible.) They seem to forget that the only reason people are coming to them is for the product and that it must remain high quality.

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

Dean Roddey and Robert Green discussed the future of HA:

RG >> How often would you have to access the HA/S machine

Yes! YES! I totally agree that the devil is in the details of how a "blessed" alarm panel communicates with a HA system. That's the part that I contend needs to get a lot smarter to move into the next generation of usability. Right now, you're correct, all that's happening on the PC is simple I/O. But I want something smarter, and those smarts *aren't* going to be found on a panel.

My HA/S system should be able to use video processing (that stays in my house, incidentally, otherwise there's no SAF) to determine if *I* tripped the alarm accidentally before the police are called. The insurance and alarm industry, along with all of the standards-making bodies that are involved in the alarm installation process, act as subtle brakes on progress towards a new way of doing things.

Current alarm systems are stupid. They will false from thunderstorms and all sorts of other causes that just a little bit of machine IQ could have determined were not legitimate activations. Set a variable called "FalseFactor" and input TOD, weather conditions, previous conditions, etc. I want a sensor on my garbage can that tells the system when move this can the night before trash day, a false alarm is likely and to increase that FalseFactor so that the system possibly waits for a second and third event to determine if its a break-in.

I want a system that knows that the power's "blinked" three times in the last 5 minutes, the rain is falling hard, the sky has darkened, there is nearby and strong lightning and thunder and that glass break sensor that just tripped may have only sensed vibrations from a nearby thunderstrike and not a window being smashed with a crowbar wrapped in a towel.

Can Charmed Quark help me take out the trash and yet not wake up my wife? She can sleep through the bag-dragging and door-opening but the alarm warning tone gets her up every time, as it should. Yes, I know I am an idiot for not disarming and rearming the panel, so I need an idiot proof HA/S system. I haven't found one.

Worse, still, some of the commercial installers I've dealt with equate a desire for "Fewer False Alarms" with a request for making the system less sensitive and thus less secure. What I want is a house that's at least as smart as my dog. She can distinguish between the UPS guy and a Jehovah's witness. Don't ask me how, but she waits for the UPS guy by the front LR window but the JW's are waited for behind the front door with a barely audible growl. She won't start barking until they touch the door or make some sort of loud noise. Then it's Katy bar the door!

(Yes, I have thought of putting a GPS and a wireless microphone on the dog but she generally eats harnesses and attachments. :-) We had a Widgetcam for a couple of days until we weren't watching.)

Yes - But for reasons that have little to do with technology, just custom. I believe when the technological advantages of PC-based systems outweigh those available to the traditional systems, there will be a sea change. I believe it's happening now because the form factor, reliability and processing power have converged to a size and price point that makes economic sense. Certainly there were other options: expansion doohickeys, extenders and other kludges. But there really wasn't anything (other than proprietary laptops) that could match the size, CPU horsepower, efficiency and plain overall elegance of the mini-ITX.

No, it's unfortunate that it might be cast that way but for me it's about a decision fork I reached. I've got an OMNI LT, but I can't really see going to something bigger in that line or any other panel line. What I can see is using the LT as the core security panel. I'll just use it to communicate with a central station and dial a call list because that's what it's good at.

But no Omni or Elk panel I've read about can provide the smarts I need to take HA/S to the next level. I can only get that from a form factor like the mini-ITX. If enough USB or Ethernet based control peripherals appear at a reasonable cost, it will be even better and I am sure those devices are in the pipeline.

Right now, I am using my Via with a Leadtek video card inside but I am not happy with that option because the card's just a little too big for the space and all the cables. The Via, at least when mounted in a Casetronic's case, uses a slot "bender" to mount the card horizontally. It's already worked loosed twice, confirming my overall suspicion of slot extenders and expansion chassis. I will probably switch to an external USB video unit just to keep the case clear of extendo-trash but I would prefer integrated solution from Via that offers as much as the Leadtek card does.

I don't think it will be long until Via incorporates on-board video processing with a cable tuner. Since they work closely with three large chipmakers - Intel, IBM and AMD - they've seen how each company implements its technology. That interoperation with the "big three" gives them valuable insights and viewpoints.

More importantly, because they worked with the big boys they are more immune to the NIH syndrome. In what I see as a replay of the American auto industry, while the big three concentrated on speed, speed and more speed, Via was working on cheap and efficient. Sounds like Via's the Japanese auto industry in that equation. It's why I think that Via's the one to make the big leap. They're taking their swing last, after getting to watch all the others. That gives them an advantage.

multi-channel

That sounds neat. A great use for an older box fast enough to serve music but perhaps not up to video speeds. I assume that part of your reasoning for doing it this way is to reduce the need for someone to be a network engineer to deploy a client/server based program like Charmed Quark.

Dude! You I and clearly have differing opinions on what "commodity" items are. You're used to higher priced components than I am. I'll mount touchcreen controllers on all my walls when the price hits $50 per unit. It will be sooner than you think as the great worldwide gear-up to produce LCD panels hits its stride and the glut comes. I *hope* it will be soon, anyway! :-)

-- Bobby G.

I think that was true in the beginning when getting an appliance module to turn ON and OFF by PC control was a novel idea. I watched lots of subject matter experts who were sharp business pros in their own field thrash into bankruptcy because that wasn't enough. Super sharp PC skills were needed to stay competitive as soon as the Pentium class chips appeared and PCs began blowing the doors off minicomputers in the business environment. Now people were beginning to have serious expectations regarding ease of use, interoperability and reliability in software. That took skill. It took constantly evolving skills as the HW platform evolved at lightning speed, often changing the entire playing field in less than a year.

Well put. I enjoy our discussions because I never doubt for a minute you've given great thought to the all the issues facing the modern software designer. At first I thought you were too software-centric but I've come to realize your model is entirely appropriate for an ever-shifting hardware, firmware and OS landscape. A high level of abstraction allows for a lot flexibility.

Well, in my experience, customers will tell you anyway, but I get your point! The best software engineer is like the best film maker or attorney or CPA. Give them a good client that can explain the intricacies of the subject at hand and they can then use their detailed professional knowledge to secure the best outcome. It's also why I laugh a little when every so often some newcomer announces the latest, greatest HA program ever written looking for front money from beta alpha and beta testers, as if it were a privilege and not a Herculean effort to design, code and debug application software.

That is an interesting side benefit.

Hmmm. I could make a pretty strong case that most progress came from people who believed that there were NO limitations to what they could accomplish if they kept at it. There was a great program on just recently about Newton, a man who just figured things out and saw answers to things that people didn't even understand as questions. I realize you have a business to run, so dreaming's probably left to the idle rich, but I want to know when the real smart house is coming. Not this loose collection of electronic fiefdoms just barely out of the Dark Ages.

That's what all you "quality first" guys say until you get rich! :-)

I'm having trouble even thinking of three manufacturers that still put quality over profits. There's this guy who makes a couple of pianos a year. My friends just bought one for $80K so I assume he's a quality-oriented kind of guy. Jeff Volp's a quality guy or a soldering machine - can't tell which! :-) But big companies? The ones I would have called "quality" 10 years ago have eroded mightily. The micro-Benzes are but one example.

-- Bobby G.

Agreed. My experience has been that neither computer hardware, nor computer operating system, nor autonomous systems (security panel, programmable thermostats etc) nor inter-device communication if using hardwired (IOW, not X10, not ... add your own list here) have been an obstacle to dependable HA for almost a decade. Most of the HW and SW concerns discussed in this thread have been addressed solved long ago.

As Dean implies, some HA PC software for federated systems (Homeseer, Premise systems) have/are still not reliable enough (for my requirements) but Savoy's CyberHouse, and CQS (based on limited experience) are.

With that SW (and all others regardless of their other deficiencies) the principal obstacle to progress is development of robust/unbreakable rules and logic. Most of the hypothetical discussion in this thread of which length and width of PC motherboard (or OS, or inter-device communication method, or whatever) is "the future of HA " is jist plain silly.

Anyone who has programmed beyond (or maybe esp. including!) BASICA spaghetti code will appreciate the difficulty of writing programs that do not contain errors. IME, for sufficiently complex systems, writing and maintaining code that embodies the users intentions ("rules") is the fundamental outstanding challenge for installer, end-user and programmer alike (even if they are one and the same person).

In 7+ years of using a federated PC HA system, I cannot recall a PC hardware, or OS, or (with CyberHouse) SW error that caused a significant mistake. Other than inter-device communication errors (i.e., X-10) errors have been predominantly of my own making by flawed/inadequate rule-making/programming, sometimes triggered by, and compounding the consequences of, flawed/ambiguous environmental data.

The strength of standalone components such as programmable thermostats and security panels lies in part in that they limit the negative consequences of bad rule sets/programming. Having written many a poor rule/line/code myself, I have been glad that basic functionality of thermostats and security is under the control of bullet-proof code (often ladder logic) that I couldn't inadvertently break.

So, in my experience and opinion, the future of HA has to do with translating human desiderata into actions and environmental conditions through logic ("smart rules") acting on sufficiently accurate data in a way that sufficiently reduces the likelihood of an unacceptable mistake.

IMO, most folks what git beyond the hypothesizing/hypothetical/hyperbole are likely to arrive at a similar conclusion (for sufficiently complex systems).

The developers of software and human interface(s) that solve this constellation of problems in a way that protects their intellectual property stand a good chance at taking home all the beans.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult ww.ECOntrol.org

Robert Green discussed the future of touchscreens;

I'll mount

Amen, brother! Over $1000 a wall is a little extreme, but on the other hand, my PDA isn't quite cutting it.

Regards,

Neil

Neil J. Hubbard and Robert Green discussed the future of touchscreens;

I was sorely tempted to go that route because *most* of what you need in a touchscreen package is already available in a PDA. I'm also a big fan of COTS solutions. It's that last little bit of turning a PDA into a functional touchscreen for HA that's dicey. On the other hand, I think folks like you who've adapted PDA's to the job have gained a lot of important experience about what works, what doesn't and what needs tweaking. You'll know better than most what specs are important in an inexpensive touchscreen.

I bought a little 7" LCD display for $150 that I thought would fill the bill as a passive display for system status, playlists, etc. but the wife thinks they're too chintzy and too hard to read in all types of light and from all angles. She's right. They're not touchscreens, either. Still, it lets me do a lot of things that I would have fired up a PC monitor or a TV to do, and that save me a little money. Might take 20 years to get a payback, though! (-:

-- Bobby G.

No, I don't. Nor apparently does HomeSeer.

Turns out that the Pro-100 controller sold by HomeSeer is a

*not* the 170mmx 170mm mini-ITX form factor with which Bobby is so infatuated.

It is a 200 x 150mm motherboard made by LEX COMPUTECH CO aka Lex System

who also manufactures of the PRO-100 case

It is (also) a hoot to read Lex System's banner on their web site:

"Next Generation Embedded System The Future Is Available Now! "

about their "non-mini-ITX" form-factor board that incorporates the oldie-but-goodie PC-104 expansion bus.

We expect such rah-rah advocacy from manufacturers, but in my opinion, comp.home.automation readers are best served by posts from participants that maintain a semblance of objectivity and adherence to the facts.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Folks who have VIA mini-ITX boards may already have discovered that VIA chip sets are on the known-incompatible list of several manufacturers/sources of add-in video input boards. ABIK, none of the current VIA-made mini-ITX boards are available with (useable) on-board video input.

The Lex product solves this problem by incorporating video input on the motherboard itself which is likely part of the reason it was chosen by Homeseer.

The fact that these are non-standard boards (1.e., oddball size from an obscure manufacturer with no obvious retail source) may also be attractive to Homeseer because it makes it harder to make illegal clones.

These observations would seem to be at odds with the original assertion that the and "the future of HA" (Homeseer's and others) lies in _standardization_, especially with the 17cmx 17cm mini-ITX format.

++++++++++++++

Interestingly, the VIA VX700 product announced in March 2006 as the "First Single-Chipset Solution for [ Ultra Mobile PC's] UMPCs' that began sampling last week.

eliminates the video compatibility problem by incorporating that function in the 1-chip + CPU solution.

Intended for Ultra Mobile PC's such as Samsung's Q1

and is apparently used in the DualCor cPC which can run WinXP Tablet

The VX700 has support for four PCI cards, which implies intended applications physically larger than UMPC. Significantly, the chip uses only 3.5 watts which makes Power Over Ethernet applications practical when combined with low-power CPUs.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

Home automation hardware continues to shrink in cost, size and power requirements even as software and interfaces increase in function and ease-of-use.

HomeSeer's latest hardware platform is in the form of a wall-wart, not much bigger than a mouse.

The HomeTroller-Mini runs HomeSeer home automation software using Mono on top of Linux on a 1ghz processor. It will reportedly sell, with installed OS and HS software, for less than $300 beginning Q2 2011.

Web enabled, it can be controlled and viewed from any web-connected computer, but small devices such as cell phones and pads of various stripes are fast becoming the interfaces of choice in many situations.

HTH ... Marc

That's a fact. I no longer use any kind of remote control. I now use cheap android tablets + homeseer + some pretty simple coding to control everything.

Will HomeSeer do conditional processing or conditional event initiation and/or recursive looping code?

If not, Can one interface their own code to the interface to override the usually dumb macro intelligence level?

TIA

HomeSeer's latest hardware platform is in the form of a wall-wart, not much bigger than a mouse.

The HomeTroller-Mini runs HomeSeer home automation software using Mono on top of Linux on a 1ghz processor. It will reportedly sell, with installed OS and HS software, for less than $300 beginning Q2 2011.

Web enabled, it can be controlled and viewed from any web-connected computer, but small devices such as cell phones and pads of various stripes are fast becoming the interfaces of choice in many situations.

HTH ... Marc

Yes it can " do conditional processing" and "conditional event initiation". But as understand the conventional use of the term "recursion", one either uses recursion or a (eg: DO) loop. If for some reason one absolutely needed a "recursive looping code" (IOW, recursion within a loop?), one could write it as a script. Can you give an actual example of where "recursive looping code" would be needed or desirable?

Yes one can incorporate one's own code in a variety ways.

But no, it doesn't have "the usually dumb macro intelligence level" if I understand what you mean by "dumb"

... Marc

not much bigger than a mouse.

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Yup ;-) I use both my current iPhone and the earlier model it replaced.

At last count at

there were at least 330 iPhone and 100 Android Home Automation apps.

... Marc

I used recursion in my dawn lamp for morning wakeup alarms. I used a 300 watt halogen conditionaled to go on only work mornings.

The code called itself recursively every three minutes and brightened the lamp about 3% each time until over 97%. It was easier than attempting to write in flags in the system I was using. If a manual "lamp off" was sent from another controller (sick day) the recursion was aborted and terminated.

I need a new system to begin my home automation for the new house, when I get time. So far the X10 units have become very unreliable with a co-gen I am running.

Yes it can " do conditional processing" and "conditional event initiation". But as understand the conventional use of the term "recursion", one either uses recursion or a (eg: DO) loop. If for some reason one absolutely needed a "recursive looping code" (IOW, recursion within a loop?), one could write it as a script. Can you give an actual example of where "recursive looping code" would be needed or desirable?

Yes one can incorporate one's own code in a variety ways.

But no, it doesn't have "the usually dumb macro intelligence level" if I understand what you mean by "dumb"

... Marc