The great thing about open communities is the collective wisdom that is available through an active community. About a month ago we had a surge of people coming to the website checking us out and one important thing we got out of it was the numerous pointers on all the technology and specifications that are out there. It turns out the world of domotics is much bigger than X10 and INSTEON after all.

We got some pointers on BACnet which today seems to be very closely aligned with KNX, a set of specifications we were already looking at (you can find the KNX project status page here). BACnet and KNX seem to have a pretty close 1:1 mapping of datatypes providing a level of interoperability between the networks.

Another pointer we got was to OASIS Obix effort, something that seems to have our old dear friend IBM as one of the drivers. It is an interesting effort where one of the goals is to create integration between facilities control and enterprise applications (imagine calendaring application making a meeting room reservation and controlling the HVAC accordingly). We'll see where that effort leads.

Furthermore, Christian Bauer put some time and effort in evaluating xAP/xPL project, another integration effort at device control protocol level. I'm pretty sure there's something useful in there to learn in terms of control protocol message definition.

All of this is useful to us to understand the landscape and where OpenRemote best fits in. In private discussions people have asked if OpenRemote plans to address things like office or workplace environment control and monitoring (I personally recall once walking into an office on a weekend just to find all lights on, all doors unlocked and nobody around) and how much of an overlap there really is between home automation and building automation?

For some, home automation is clearly centered around their AV control. For others, the main benefit comes from security and monitoring aspects. Yet in other discussions people found the idea of assistive domotics extremely appealing (all about the demographic change, your parents getting older and needing increased care). There's a knowledge base we are trying to fill with all the information. Please add, make comments and suggest more things we should be looking at for OpenRemote. And see you on the forums!

Sourceforge was migrating their subversion repository today so instead of trying to put some code into repository I needed to find something else to do.

So I finished reading the INSTEON whitepaper I wrote about earlier adding some information about device type broadcast messages (something that had came up with a private conversation earlier), device linking and groups.

Not a huge amount of new information but it completes the document and I suppose is about as far as one can get with INSTEON by reading about it. The next step would be to buy some hardware, development kits and start programming.

Maybe for another day.

Also I changed the document name to Technical Introduction to INSTEON which is probably a better name for it anyway. Christian Bauer has also added some information he's discovered as part of his research.