So I went to Chichester to pass the 5 days certification on behalf of Open Remote. You will all be proud to know I passed. I blogged about the experience on my generic blog here. Here I would like to talk about what I believe we can bring to the field.
First off it is clear that KNX is high end technology. Turning on a light in KNX cost $1000. Not kidding. They kind of look down on Crestron, as old hat, unreliable
. Plus with the Olympics under the KNX belt, the Chinese are also certified members providing everything and more importantly hardware.
I believe we can offer software, a lot of it. Take the iPhone manager that CB just announced. From an KNX installer's point of view it means to create a remote for your customer, or better yet let the customer create his own on the web without ever having to touch your commissioning. With an actual commissioned KNX install, you can have an ORC as a controller that maps the buttons on the iPhone to actual group addresses sent via Calimero. Voila! you have offered a programmable UI environment to the customer. We are of course not the first ones to offer controller environments on KNX but we would be one of the first Open Source ones (after all that is KNX@Home was :)
KNX is not a programming model environment however, which is what I was really looking for. It is a firmware specification that gets actuators and sensors to exchange message signed as 1 bit, 2 bit, a nibble, a byte, 2 bytes. That's it. That's a lot already but that is it. The Programming abstraction is very low level, although flexible and robust. Really ETS, the programming tool is a firmware programming tool that turns bits on in hardware through configuration menus and links those bits to listen to messages on group addresses. Through ORC we could offer more intuitive and powerful programming models, The publish subscribe mechanism is a well known one and instead of bits and bytes we actually exchange messages instead of bit. So scene programming while a trivial mental construct is a convoluted, device dependent mess at the time.
Looking forward to helping.
For a KNX Twisted Pair installation, you need: - cable and connectors - an RS232 or USB interface - a power supply, with choke - a BCU with application module Here, single fold push buttons cost barely less than 4 fold push buttons. - An actuator Simple switching actuators typically have 4 channels. So, yes, € 1 000, for the first say 2 or 4 lights. For every further light, the price is much less. It's the same in a computer network: connecting your first two computers in the company together and with the Internet is expensive; the 3rd to the 50th barely cost more than the price of the machine.
The electrical installer - not the home or building owner - licenses ETS (€ 1 000), a notebook, ...
Hi,
I would like to help to bring OpenRemote and KNX together.