Re: HomeBrain

["David Buckley" <db@xxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Kenneth Watt" <kwatt@f...> wrote:
> You say not as good as HV with X10, can you explain that a bit more?

Most of the HA controllers out there (HV, JDS, ADI etc) all centre
themselves around X10, and thus have spent an extraordinary amount of
time trying to support every X10 featureset item.  I think from
observation (though I dont know, as I'm not an HV owner) that HV even
ties to guess the level of dimming on a light by estimating where the
TW523 has not delivered dim commands.  A brave feat indeed.

Furthermore, most controllers (and this includes many windowsy /
linuxy control apps) have specific syntax for different types
of "thing" they control.  There are different forms of the IF
statement for each type of "thing".

It is a design principle of HomeBrain that devices and their
peculiarities are isolated into the drivers, and the control elements
of HomeBrain is device independent.  Thus in HSL there is only one IF
statement syntax.

Apart from my disinclination towards X10, the real problem is that
X10 (aside from on/off) does things differently than most other
control technologies, and thus doesnt fit well with the device
implementation independent view of the world that HomeBrain uses.
HomeBrain (outside the drivers) cant tell the difference between an
X10 thing and a (for example) hardwired digital I/O thing.  There is
no syntax in HSL (more later) that is specific to X10.

So, what does HomeBrain do with X10:  It natively sends on and off.
It natively recognises on and off.  It'll probably do dimming send,
when I get around to it.  The driver supports some commands that map
really badly to anything outside of X10, such as "all units off".
[when I say maps really badly, for example, in a system that is 10%
X10, what does all units off mean?  Does that include the alarm
system, for example?]  But (to keep the example) although all units
off is not supported natively, but you can through scripting make it
do whatever you want.

But the stuff HomeBrain does it tries to do well.  For example, each
housecode has its units tracked individually, so that an X-10 stream
like

G1 G-OFF G5 G6 H2 G7 H3 G-ON H4 H-OFF

the G-ON will switch G5/G6/G7 on, even though their was in
intervening set of H codes.  I dont know if other controllers have
that logic, but I've seen lots of code out there that would not do
the right thing when faced with that stream.  They have a single
housecode view, and thus when the first H2 arrived, the fact that G5
and G6 are still outstanding would be forgotten.


> Programming, how is it done?

Almost all programming tasks can be accomplished using the bundled
scripting langaue, HSL, HomeBrain Scripting Language.  The language
compiles to machine code, and is both fast and safe.  If you want to
write a driver, get out your C compiler that produces 8086 code, and
use the supplied examples, headers and/or precompiled / preassembled
object modules to build a driver.  There may even be a suitable free
C compiler out there, I have my eye on a suitable candidate...

David