Any chance of supporting xAP natively?

[bradsjm]

The protocols supported by the ISY are fairly heavy duty with a good deal of overhead and complexity that may not always be appropriate. Has there been any discussion on implementing the popular xAP Home Automation protocol to support the basic control and event notification functionality?

 

www.xapautomation.org

 

xAP is an open protocol intended to support the integration of telemetry and control devices primarily within the home - it is the glue that supports the interconnectivity of Home Automation devices.

 

The primary design objectives are:

 

* Simple, easy to implement/retrofit

* Suitable for use with a wide range of processing capabilities, from embedded controllers to fully fledged PC's

* Operating system agnostic

* Programming language agnostic

* Network agnostic

[MikeB]

Michel -

 

You and I were chatting on Techmall about the possibility of interfacing 3rd party products, specifically CQC (http://www.charmedquark.com), with the ISY-26.

 

This gentleman is the author of the current CQC Insteon driver (using the PLM directly).

 

I think there is interest in writing an ISY-26 driver for CQC, but current limitations in CQC's driver model make this a very difficult task. If the ISY-26 supported xAP, this would be much easier.

 

Is this a possibility?

[Michel Kohanim]

Michel -

 

You and I were chatting on Techmall about the possibility of interfacing 3rd party products, specifically CQC (http://www.charmedquark.com), with the ISY-26.

 

This gentleman is the author of the current CQC Insteon driver (using the PLM directly).

 

I think there is interest in writing an ISY-26 driver for CQC, but current limitations in CQC's driver model make this a very difficult task. If the ISY-26 supported xAP, this would be much easier.

 

Is this a possibility?

 

 

bradsjm and MikeB,

 

Thanks so very much for the feedback.

 

We would certainly entertain supporting any protocol that enables our customers to have an "inexpensive" but feature rich home automation solution. Usually, the only problem is that "standard"/"popular" are not always universal; example: we consider our web services to be quite popular and standardized (UPnP) but apparently not to CQC! Furthermore, Microsoft (alongside many others) has already published its own device communications protocol called Web Services on Devices (WSD). Given the finite amount of resources in our controller, thus, it would be quite impractical to support "all" standards/popular protocols.

 

All this said, however, I would be delighted to have a 3 way call and discuss the possibilities; there might be a simple solution out there which does not require the full support for xAP!

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[Mark Sanctuary]

On a local computer there are almost unlimited space resources to write driver code for the current ISY protocols that already exist. So I would think with the ISY having small resources it would be better to create the driver framework that would be on the user's local computer than trying to add more code on the ISY. This way the ISY can grow with adding much more devices support for it to control, and new web interface features for its administration console. Gosh the xAP team might be able to add some "handshake" code to connect thru the existing callbacks the ISY already has. Just my 2¢

 

If anything take Michael up on doing the conference call he will go the extra mile to help you figure out what can be done.