FW: HomeVision control of C-Bus ( as at UKHA2004 )

["Kevin Hawkins" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For those with HomeVision and C-Bus I thought I'd mention that with
the imminient release of the 3.4 ROM from CSI for HomeVision you will be
able to directly control C-Bus from HomeVision schedules in a broadly
similar way to X10 currently. The new ROM supports 'Custom Lighting' within
HomeVision but not C-Bus persay. No PC will be required but a serial port
will be used to connect to the C-Bus RS232 interface. This will also allow
switch inputs on HV to control C-Bus loads and C-Bus switches to set HV
outputs.

There will be two routes to doing this - firstly a set of 'C-Bus'
macros that I will release that you just copy and paste into your existing
schedules and they handle the protocol conversion to C-Bus. HomeVision
itself does a lot of the work of encoding/decoding the C-Bus protocol. 
This
is what was show at UKHA 2004. A second version will use an accompanying
hardware interface providing a direct C-Bus interface. The advantages of
the
hardware version are:-

1) The C-Bus decoding is offloaded from HomeVision meaning HV can
run faster
2) Less macro/memory space is absorbed with HomeVision.
3) Full synching is supported with the C-Bus network such that at
power on and thereafter C-Bus loads are constantly synched with the
HomeVisions state table. Using the software only version synch is only
maintained by tracking changes. Although it is unlikely changes will be
missed heavy schedules in HV can cause serial data to be lost and also an
initial synch cant be obtained at power on.
4) On board C-Bus interface
5) There are extra ports on the interface for later expansion
6) Other software personalities >may< become available to support
other features eg xAP, LCD displays, keypad, VIOM etc etc.


This hardware board is the same hardware board as the xAP to C-Bus
gateway - it just runs different firmware. The hardware is final and
already
available - just the software to do.

Availabilty ?? Next few weeks for the software macros - depending on
the ROM being released from CSI. Hardware solution guessing about 8 weeks,
next project after the xAP to C-Bus gateway and the final ROM code freeze.


Kevin