Re: Looking at Zwave products and need recommendations?

[Neil Cherry <njc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 01:52:34 GMT, Dean Roddey wrote:
> "Dave Houston" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:431792fa.43118588@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> No one has said that only HS supports it. There was someone else who was
>> supporting it in a freeware app but the name escapes me at the moment.
>>
>> Do you think they made it easier for HS?
>>
>
> If you mean were they more cooperative with HS, the answer is probably yes.
> HS, as I understand it, paid the price for the toolkit stuff, which probably
> got them a little more love. We just couldn't justify paying all that money
> for what could essentially have been written down in ~10 pages of high level
> info plus about 3 smallish documents of spec details that already existed,
> i.e. the information that someone wanting to interface to ZW, as apposed to
> build ZW hardware, would need. So effectively we had to figure it out
> ourselves, but we did in the end.
>
> I've made my dismay about their lack of support for folks like us known to
> them in fairly strong terms, assuming what I think really matters. I would
> just think that, had they taken the opposite approach with automation system
> vendors (as apposed to hardware OEMs) and really helped us to get quality
> support for their product in place, and gave us the docs we need instead of
> making us pay for the right, that right now UPB and Zigbee would be looking
> at a much more entrenched status quo, because Z-Wave would be robustly
> supported in every automation product, and more people would have adopted it
> because it was there and supported and in a good position between high end
> stuff and X-10.

ZWave and I had discussions about getting that documentation for use
with Open Source projects (the same few sections you discuss above).
That was to say the least a fruitless conversation!  I took the time
to explain what Open Source is and they initially agreed that they
couldn't come to a comprimise. But they kept trying to push me to a
consultant who would charge to write the Open Source driver as long as
I signed their NDA (can you see the irony in that statement ? :-/ ). I
wasn't upset with them saying no, I was upset with that last portion
and the fact that they kept contacting me after I said that is not a
feasible proposition. At that point they annoyed me. When I said I can
not work with ZWave they should have taken the hint and dropped it. To
this date I filter their email into the trash folder. Oh, the
consultant was smart enough to figure out this wouldn't work and let
it go.

BTW, the dev kit they were trying to sell me was the $15K full blown
hardware and software Dev Kit. I did let them know that it is fully
possible to reverse engineer their serial & USB communications to get
what the Open Source community wanted but that I won't bother helping
them to sell any ZWave products.

Sorry for the rant.

--
Linux Home Automation         Neil Cherry       ncherry@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/               (Text only)
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