I had a long discussion with Smarthome about the license you MUST agree to in order to purchase their Insteon SDK, which includes nondisclosure terms as well as requiring you to get their permission before distributing anything. And other hostile legal stuff. The person I was discussing this started off trying to be helpful and then did a 180 and gave me a bunch of corporate doublespeak BS that clearly indicated that they weren't going to change anything. Smarthome has in the past been friendly to free softw
Damn, the people you run into on/. How ya doin', Steve? (It's Nathan)
It is possible to get X-10 to work reliably, it just takes some work, a little tinkering, and quality components. My house is now almost exclusively based on X-10, largely on Smarthome Keypadlincs. Whoever wired this place initially was a moron, and pulling new romex was way more trouble than it was worth. Light switches that don't control the lights, places where you have to wander into dark rooms to find the lightswitches, etc. Enter powerline carrier gear. I've found that as long as I stay away from the cheapo X-10 crap (the stuff largely marketed by x10.com) and stick with either Smarthome or Leviton-manufactured bits, things work fairly well. Oh, and a whole-house filter and active phase-to-phase repeater. I have one TV that soaks up signal and thus must be filtered at the outlet, but otherwise everything has "just worked" for about 18 months now.
Insteon looks like a quantum leap forward, but I haven't embraced it because it's a single-source system. Once 3-4 vendors make products, I might consider upgrading. The protocol is much, much, much more solid (acknowledgements, checksums, more data bytes), and I definitely wouldn't complain about better response times. Open source support is a deal-breaker, however. Like Spidey pointed out, Neil Cherry seems to not think this will be an issue based on his conversations, but I'm taking a very wait-and-see attitude. Even if SHM never officially supports it, if at least someone gets it working and they don't get sued, I'll consider it workable. Their closed attitude does rather concern me, however - exactly who do they think they're selling to if it's not the tinkerer market?
I'll point out that Smarthome was never really helpful about documenting the original X-10 USB Powerlinc protocol, either. I messed with it for a while by sniffing with the Windows driver, and then decided it was easier to stick with good ol' RS232. Eventually I just started using WiSH, and the open source community eventually worked out the details on the USB PLv1. (I continue to use serial, however)
Smarthome is free-software hostile with Insteon (Score:2, Interesting)
Smarthome has in the past been friendly to free softw
Re:Smarthome is free-software hostile with Insteon (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
http://www.linuxha.com/athome/common/iplcd/index.
And I know for a fact that Neil Cherry (the developer of the above software) got permission from Smarthome to release the software.
Re:Smarthome is free-software hostile with Insteon (Score:3, Informative)
It is possible to get X-10 to work reliably, it just takes some work, a little tinkering, and quality components. My house is now almost exclusively based on X-10, largely on Smarthome Keypadlincs. Whoever wired this place initially was a moron, and pulling new romex was way more trouble than it was worth. Light switches that don't control the lights, places where you have to wander into dark rooms to find the lightswitches, etc. Enter powerline carrier gear. I've found that as long as I stay away from the cheapo X-10 crap (the stuff largely marketed by x10.com) and stick with either Smarthome or Leviton-manufactured bits, things work fairly well. Oh, and a whole-house filter and active phase-to-phase repeater. I have one TV that soaks up signal and thus must be filtered at the outlet, but otherwise everything has "just worked" for about 18 months now.
Insteon looks like a quantum leap forward, but I haven't embraced it because it's a single-source system. Once 3-4 vendors make products, I might consider upgrading. The protocol is much, much, much more solid (acknowledgements, checksums, more data bytes), and I definitely wouldn't complain about better response times. Open source support is a deal-breaker, however. Like Spidey pointed out, Neil Cherry seems to not think this will be an issue based on his conversations, but I'm taking a very wait-and-see attitude. Even if SHM never officially supports it, if at least someone gets it working and they don't get sued, I'll consider it workable. Their closed attitude does rather concern me, however - exactly who do they think they're selling to if it's not the tinkerer market?
I'll point out that Smarthome was never really helpful about documenting the original X-10 USB Powerlinc protocol, either. I messed with it for a while by sniffing with the Windows driver, and then decided it was easier to stick with good ol' RS232. Eventually I just started using WiSH, and the open source community eventually worked out the details on the USB PLv1. (I continue to use serial, however)