First post… Been searching home automation stuff and found my way here through LMCE. Got a new house and looking to do some home automation stuff.
According to LMCE forums, “MiCasaVerde has the best Z-Wave stack”. And after reading most of your wiki, it looks like that is the only portion of your stack that is closed source.
Can I buy the Z-wave stick and drivers and whatever licenses I need and roll my own router solution? I’ve got a Netgear WNR3500L with Gigabit LAN ports and Wireless N that I could use as a base platform. I’d just rather have a single smart router than to configure Vera as a slave. And I like gigabit + N much better.
Plus I’m an embedded developer by day and I have a couple of OMAP 3530 development boards from Mistral laying around that could be fun for home automation because they have a lot of IO capability.
I’m willing to pay, not trying to be cheap but I have enough gadgets cluttering my office.
David
I believe this is the purpose of the mios.com project. As the website shows, it was suppose to come out Feb 2010. However, that never occurred and the webmaster appears too lazy to update it with a new date. Anyhow, that may be the direction you would take but without much information being provided maybe someone from MCV can tell you more about the timeline of Mios.
Thanks for the replies, I am a little closer to what I want. I may just take my chances and buy the Z-wave stick from micasaverde store. If I buy the stick, it should come with drivers right? Or at least a license to use their USB stack which is all I really want.
Mios sounds cool and maybe something I can get into but right now it looks like it is very promising vaporware for now.
Productizing an open software based appliance is a difficult task, I’ve worked for a company trying to do just that. My hat’s off to the Vera developers for the work so far. But I’m enough of a nerd that I would rather buy the pieces I want and build my own system than try adapt someone else’s appliance solution to my needs.
davidsmoot: I don’t understand you, but I encourage you. I hope you’ll feed back to this group any discoveries you make. Independent developers often come up with ideas that a group misses, and we’re always open to new ideas here in the MCV forum. We’re obviously a rather masochistic bunch (beta testers always are) but if it were me, I think I’d order a flail before I’d order a bare Z-wave stick!
I guess you should contact MCV directly on that.
From the past conversations (particularly on port to SheevaPlug) my impression was MCV didn’t intend to issue any sort of public SDK unless you do some sort of OEM arrangement, but things could change.
AFAIK ControlThink SDK is the only “easy” option available, but I doubt it can possibly run on non x86 platform.
[quote=“davidsmoot, post:4, topic:165862”]Thanks for the replies, I am a little closer to what I want. I may just take my chances and buy the Z-wave stick from micasaverde store. If I buy the stick, it should come with drivers right? Or at least a license to use their USB stack which is all I really want.
Mios sounds cool and maybe something I can get into but right now it looks like it is very promising vaporware for now.
Productizing an open software based appliance is a difficult task, I’ve worked for a company trying to do just that. My hat’s off to the Vera developers for the work so far. But I’m enough of a nerd that I would rather buy the pieces I want and build my own system than try adapt someone else’s appliance solution to my needs.
David[/quote]The stick just uses some fairly generic serial port drivers I think, so it should be easily seen by the OS; however that being said I guess you will need to still have access to the Zwave side of the stick through the serial port, which may not be as easy!
davidsmoot: I used to play around with the ControlThink SDK back before I had heard of Vera. It was fun and simple to work with on a Windows machine using C# for coding. You could use the same .Net programming in Mono (http://www.mono-project.com) and compile for Mac OS X and Linux… I suppose it is only a matter of finding needed device drivers. Haven’t done this, just typing hypothetically.
I wouldn’t have high hopes of using controlThink .net libs on Mono, but I could be wrong.
I am coding a system for sheeva plugs using Qt. Just integrated oneWire, to be able to measure soil moisture for an automatic lawn sprinkler.
OpenZWave next…
I got involve with Micasaverde first through LinuxMCE too… I have since abandoned using LinuxMCE because the primary developers essentially had blinders on as to the way they intended LMCE to be used (their way, their interface choices, on the hardware that they considered acceptable & a pretty much unstated but understood; “if you wanted to configure it differently, learn to code in C, and write it yourself/if you want to play in our sandbox, our toys, our rules…”). I (really and truly) mean no offence to the Linux MCE community, despite the way that this comes off (and may go back and give it a second try in the future). That’s just the overall impression I got.
And,… my goals were a little different (needed a higher WAF “Wife Acceptance Factor”),… A MCV Vera + a MythTV & Samba server with Ubuntu desktop Multi-media PC front-ends ends up a better approach for me. I get to customize my front-ends (Ubuntu with Compiz/Cairo-dock interface, controlled by tiny wireless touchpad/keyboards) and run apps like Skype, Hulu, and some nice Linux native games…
You CAN use a LinuxMCE Z-wave equipped server as a secondary inclusion controller under primary control of a Micasaverde Vera,… which might satisfy your needs… IF you prefer to use LinuxMCE. That way you can let LinuxMCE handle the user interface, and multi-media & telephony cores & have LinuxMCE’s robust home security layer, but have the ease of set up of the Vera and the free off-site control for the Z-wave stuff…
If you like the above approach, you might consider (just) using your OMAP (Beagle ???) boards to set them up as LinuxMCE/Pluto Orbiters… If the boards are a beagle-board-like implementation complete with LCD screen… There is/was a version of a Pluto Orbiter App for Maemo, which was designed for the Nokia web tablets (N770-N900) which use a similar processor.
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