USB Port?

[pdmjr]

I few weeks ago I was reading some of the forums and came upon an answer from Michael that talked about no usb port - yet.  I was kind of tired and it kind of went over my head at the time.  It kept coming back to me and I tried to do a search but could not find it.  Is this something that is being considered on a next generation ISY?  This would make a whole host of devices much easier to communicate with such as the RFXCOM and the Alarm Decoder which would give you at least 75% of the alarm panels (DSC,

Honeywell) out there.  I am sure that there are many other things that I have not even begun to think of!  I know there ore other ways but for the average person, like me it would most likely be much easier!

 

Thanks

Pete

[paulbates]

Hi Pete

 

Its a great idea, however adding the USB port hardware is not enough. There needs to be operating system support to handle USB drivers for standard things like hard drives and usb serial ports. Things like the RFXcom would require additional driver development on top of the base USB drivers.

 

The ISY has its own proprietary embedded operating system, and by design is "lean and mean", It does not support external interfaces other than powerline interfaces like insteon, zwave and zigbee.. The standard windows / mac / linux usb drivers that manufacturers provide with USB devices would not work. Special ISY drivers would have to be developed. Its unlikely the rfxcom, etc would assign developers to something this specialized, if it existed.

 

I would guess this is not on the horizon, though you're right it would open a lot of possibilities.

 

The area with promise that the ISY does support is Network resources through the optional ISY Network Interface. Many devices are now part of "the internet of things" and can connect via wifi or standard ethernet network cable. The ISY can control many of these today, and that horizon really opens up when V5 of firmware is released.

 

Paul

Edited March 25, 2015 by paulbates