Re: A mentor / Advisor ?

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

One bit of propaganda oft repeated by a certain strident, incompetent and
dishonest fool is that Insteon is proprietary and only manufactured by a
single company. In fact, Insteon is no more and no less proprietary than
Z-Wave. Neither specification is published for all to see but the Insteon
SDK was initially available for $100 (including about $90 in hardware) while
the Zensys SDK cost $10K (although I suspect that not all developers were
required to pony up that amount). A company that bought the Zensys SDK has
since released a less expensive "SDK" of their own which appears to be a
wrapper for underlying Zensys SDK functions - a neat marketing ploy as a
tie-in to the devices they make but not something many serious developers
would consider.

Insteon devices and/or Insteon interfaces are under development by a rather
wide variety of companies, most of which even have some experience in Home
Automation and some of which are also working with Z-Wave. You can find a
partial list of members of the Insteon Alliance here...

     http://www.insteon.net/%5Cthealliance.html

And there are Insteon-based products being manufactured and sold by other
companies. A few have been announced in Smarthome's Insteon forum. For
example...

     http://simplehomenet.com/IO.asp
     http://simplehomenet.com/irrigation.asp
     http://simplehomenet.com/hvac.asp *
     http://simplehomenet.com/servers.asp
     http://www.smarthome.com/12000vs.html
     http://www.smarthome.com/128301.html

* Looks like I was wrong about there being no Insteon thermostats although
this will not interface with the ELK serial adapter.

Now, as any one who pays much attention to CHA knows, I've reported both
good and bad things about Insteon. I think the jury is still out on whether
Smarthome can deliver a reliable system. I don't believe I've ever gone
further than to say that for someone just starting with HA who cannot go
hard-wired, it's worth investigating and more reliable than X-10 since it
has ACK/NAK. In fact, since I did spend the $100 for an Insteon SDK the
inane terms of their ambiguous license forbid me from saying anything good
or bad about any performance tests I may or may not have conducted. ;)

As for Z-Wave, all I've done is point out weaknesses in the original design
- weaknesses that we are now told "might" be fixed in newer designs but
without any supporting evidence.

http://davehouston.net
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/roZetta/
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