Years ago, in my last house, I had purchased and installed a number of X10 switches. They were cheap, and didn't work half bad. I wrote the "ecksten" module which phonetically reads "X10" and had incorporated the ability to turn on or off the X10 devices in my house on a variety of events (alarm system arming, for example, turned off all the lights) and even from the web interface I had developed at the time. However they had two major problems:
- Commands sent to devices did not always execute.
- There was no way to query devices, so manual status changes could not be reflected in the web interface.
I'd even add a third point being that they were very slow to respond when they did. Each command took one full second to execute, when it did. At one point I had the ecksten module send periodic "refresh" commands to the devices, so that if the first command failed the second might succeed. However this meant that manual switch control was virtually impossible (and frustrating) as it would eventually be overridden by whatever state Venturii thought the light should be in.
I began to look for a better system, and found a couple of options. There was actually quite a number of alternate systems for home lighting and appliance control, but the one that won out based on feature set, functionality, price and availability was the Insteon family of products from Smarthome. (
www.smarthome.com)
When I moved out of that house, one of the first investments I made in my new home was a complete retrofit of every switch and dimmer in the house with Insteon devices from Smarthome. Although fully functional on their own, the primary purpose of their deployment was the ability to control them from Venturii, which meant writing a whole new module to talk to the devices. That module is the Venturii ION module.
To date it supports all devices in the Switched and Dimmable lighting categories, including linking and un-linking devices. It has the ability (in beta form) to read memory from devices and interpret the link tables. And it can receive commands from devices (status updates) so that Venturii can respond to manual activations of Insteon devices and use them as event generators.
If any or all of that interests you, this is the place to discuss it.
