Re: Homeseer questions

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Ian,
>
>I currently run Misterhouse to control my HA equipment which works
fine. As
>I am moving and changing most of the parameters I thought to look at
other
>possible systems and it seems homeseer is popular on the group. I do
not
>want to loose any features so was wondering if someone could answer the
>following questions:
>
>Is it possible to add a script to talk with some homebrew rf linked
>equipment ?

Almost definately, - depends how the RF equipment is interfaced to the HA
PC, but the simple answer is, if Misterhouse can talk to it, then so can
Homeseer...

>
>Is it possible to add a script to listen and sent data on a com port
for
>data from various digital and analogue cards I have. This needs to be
>monitored all the time not just on an event.
>

Yes it is, - you can open a COM port and register a callback script. The
script you register is then run whenever any data is received at the port.
So it is effectively "monitored all the time", - but it is always
event
driven, by the event of data arriving via the serial port...

>Is caller id standard ? Is it possible to program it to announce the
>callers name rather than the telephone number ?
>

It is standard in the Homeseer Phone add-on rather than in the main
Homeseer
product. (the two integrate extremely tightly). However, before Homeseer
Phone was available there were plenty of people doing CID handling with the
main HS product by using the scripting interface, and a COM port connected
CID device just as described above. There are a number of CID handling
scripts available from the HS forums. Once you have the CID data into
Homeseer, you can do whatever you want with it, including announce it via
TTS...


>Is it possible to add a script to download i.e. weather data and
announce
>it ?
>

There are so many weather scripts available to download from the HS forum
that you are spoiled for choice!! Same goes for TV listings..


>Any other comments on the system, How easy is it program ? etc
>

Well, the scripting interface and engine is VB script or PERL script, - you
can use both interchangeably, (in fact you can probably use any script
engine supported by WSH as that it what is used by Homeseer in the
background.) Both script languages are extremely well documented, so are
easy to pick up, easy to get help for, and can usually achieve any function
you wish to perform on a Windows platform... (which some people often
proffer as a weakness!)



>Oh by the way I have read the review on Marks site.
>

In my opinion, there really is nothing to touch Homeseer in this price
bracket. If there is *ANY* downside at all, it is that there are some who
consider a Windows platform too unreliable for a mission-critical server
(which I presume most of us would consider our HA servers to be!). However,
if it is any comfort, (no pun intended), Homeseer runs on any windows
platform flawlessly (including XP), and is a rock-solid piece of software,
with absolutely *excellent* support from the Author. My HA server has had
extremely good uptime (I haven't formally documented it) - the only
downtime
I can ever recall having has always been due to faulty hardware.


HTH

Paul G.


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