Re: Mini-ITX PC's a the future of HA (was Re: X-10 Mister House Motion sensor problems)

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I doubt HS' choice of a mini-ITX system had anything to do with whether a
panel is better than a PC. They have a PC based product. So using a panel
would have A) required them to build a panel, something that would cost them
a lot of money, and B) probably make major changes to their software. So,
like us, it's a choice we made implicitly a long time ago by creating the
type of product we did. Even if we thought a proprietary panel was superior,
there's not much we could do about it short of creating a completely new
product and hiring someone to do design a panel and then to have it
manufacturered.

Both platforms have their strengths. There are things that PC based systems
can do that a panel will never do. OTOH, a panel is a hugely simpler
product, and simpler (as a rule) means less likely to break. This is not to
say that PC based systems cannot be made very stable, because they can. But
it can only be done emperically by finding a set of components that fails to
fail, because we can't look inside the box. And this is not to say that
panels don't have their problems either. They do have software in them and
it can be wrong sometimes, and the market forces them over time to get more
and more complex.

We chose a PC based platform for a number of reasons. One, I had ten years
of general purpose PC based software architecture to build on. Two, there
were already plenty of panels, so what would have been the point to get into
that market. Three, I really do think that PCs are the future of automation,
though in a more 'robustified' form. Four, the PC market is an enormous R&D
machine that dwarfs the automation market, spending more every year on R&D
than Crestron and AMX's total worth I'm sure. No proprietary hardware will
be able to remotely keep up with that. Five, given the above, software
becomes what is important, not hardware, and that's what we are good at.
Six, the home is headed towards a network backbone, and those who can
provide an automation system that leverages that network can get in for a
lower cost because the home owner has alreayd bought much of the
infrastructure that doesn't get 'charged' against the automation system.
Seven, there is a tremendous range of hardware out there from tiny systems
to multi-CPU mondo-servers, on which a software product like ours can run
without change, which provides us with the abilty to scale up and down
pretty far with a single product (which greatly reduces complexity of
product development.)

-------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems
www.charmedquark.com

"Marc F Hult" <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:s7fl82lnlm3bia626drdnnfqfd469h4rsc@xxxxxxxxxx
> On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 23:59:52 -0400, "Robert Green"
> <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> <XPOdnUYmqbRM2RfZnZ2dnUVZ_qadnZ2d@xxxxxxx>:
>