hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0359.txt

Episode: 359
Title: HPR0359: Control 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0359/hpr0359.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 18:52:31

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The Utah Open Source Foundation just announced the Utah Open Source Conference 2009, October
8th through 10th at the Salt Lake Community College Miller Free Enterprise Center in
Sandy, Utah. This year's theme is Affordability, Reliability, Scalability. Check out the details
at www.20009.utoc.com. The following presentation, Control 4 Home Automation Systems, was given
on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009, by Ryan Erickson at the Provo Linux user group, visit their
site at plug.org. The bandwidth for this presentation and many others is provided by Center 7.
Some talks about the Jetsons. That's the vision. Reality isn't quite that as of yet, but that is a goal, I suppose,
because who has home automation? Do you want to have home automation systems in your house?
Grudge door opener, okay, thermostat, okay, and actually you guys were right with my
training of thought. It's who has home automation systems? Well, I have a home automation
system in my home, which integrates a lot of things, but most of you have some sort of
automation in your home. You'll have a universal remote, programmable thermostat, an alarm
clock. Some of you have dimmers. Some of you have motion dimmers. That's really common in
California now. They're regulating that they require to have motion dimmers in commercial and
pushing towards residential. You have motion lights. You have the clapper. That's automation.
One that my wife really likes, we have a Roomba. That's a great automation. The thing about
automation in most people's homes right now, you have islands of automation. So you'll have
your universal remote in home theater, or you'll have some motion lights, or you'll have a Roomba,
but they're not all integrated. When we talk about automation, I like to group into about five
different categories, because that helps you say, yeah, does this system do this sort of thing,
or this sort of thing? And those five categories are home theater entertainment,
multi-room audio, lighting, security, and then comfort, which is HVAC and weather type integration.
What you do with each of those is home theater. I think you guys know pretty much. You have
universal remote. You take your five remotes, and you turn that into one remote, or one press of a
button on a remote. Multi-room audio, multi-room audio allows you to listen to different sources in
different rooms of your house. Like my house, I could have one room listening to radio,
several other rooms listening to different MP3s at the same time. They all could be listening
to the same thing, with all that audio sync, if I'm in like a party mode or something. That's multi-room audio.
We apologize for the audio difficulties in this section. We'll continue with the presentation
momentarily. That's not working. Source selection, as well as the volume control of that room.
Lighting, when we talk home automation, we talk about automated lighting. So, in my case,
you have lighting scenes, you have a single button, it'll turn all the lights off in the house,
you walk around the house, you have lights will come on at certain times. That's fully automated
lighting. We also have talk about security. When we talk about that, we're really talking about
integration with a security fire system. Control-4 doesn't produce alarm panels. We talk to alarm
panels over typically serial. And the last thing is controlling your HVAC, scheduling, set back,
being able to call into your house or go in the web on your house, change the temperature of your
HVAC. Those are the five areas of automation that I would classify as different areas of
full automation. I'll talk a little bit about how it works. Now, I'm coming again from the
control-4 frame, but all of the automation systems, the open source automation systems,
the prosumer automation systems, as well as the higher end automation systems, all have
these five kinds of things. Now, some of them group these things together in different ways,
but those are a controller, devices, communications, some sort of user interface, and then some
kind of a setup functionality. I'm going to talk about each of those. First of all, we talk about
the controller. In a home automation system, a controller is really the brain of the system.
The controller is where you have your project file, your media database, so all the information
about all of the devices in the system, all of the drivers for those devices are all contained
in the controller. The controller also has agents like lighting scene agents, time agents,
astronomical clock agents, to do sunrise sunset calculations, timers, like I said, and then the
controller handles the interactions between the devices, typically with events, commands, and
conditionals. Most automation systems that are full automation system, you can get events based
on when a device does something. For example, if I turn a light on, I get an event
that says light was on, or I get a different event that says light level changed. And then,
based on what happened, I can then do programming with commands and conditionals.
Obviously, most of you do programming, some kind of programming, you know what commands and
conditionals are. Turn this light on to a certain level, or open the garage door,
or when the garage doors are closed, ramp the lights in the garage down, things like that,
events, commands, and conditionals. That's really what a controller does. A controller is
sort of like an operating system that holds all the devices, accepts messages from devices,
and allows you to act on those events to make the system do whatever you want. Now, in control force
controller, this is a controller. This is what we call the HC300. This is an alpha unit. That's
why it's red around here. The production units are a little different coloring. But this is a
controller. And the controller itself also has, in a lot of cases, inputs and outputs on the
controller that allow you to do different things. For example, I'll talk about just what this HC300,
what inputs and outputs it has. I can pass this one around so you guys can take a look at what I'm
talking about. Obviously, we have power. We have IR outputs, infrared outputs, because a lot of
the devices you want to control, especially in a home theater, are going to be infrared controlled.
So all of your AV stack, your receiver, your projector, your TV, they work with an IR remote.
So we have IR outputs on the controller to be able to send those with a little emitter to those
devices. We have serial ports. In this case, we have two, because we want to talk two-way
communication with those devices that have that functionality. So security panels,
different HVAC or lighting systems that are third-party systems, we will talk over serial if they
have serial. The next thing we have here is we have USB ports, but control force system actually
also has a music system built in, so we can stream music either over a USB attached hard drive
or over the network. It also lives on the network, so we have an Ethernet jack, and that's also
we can control over Ethernet if a device can be controlled over the network. The last things we
have here is we have audio inputs and outputs, because the control force system can stream audio
to other devices within the house over the network, or it can also have outputs going to your
multirimodio system. So I can stream two MP3 streams out of this controller simultaneously.
I can also be encoding a different stream going somewhere else in the house.
All right, and the last thing we have are we have video outputs on this controller.
The video outputs are because in your home theater, what's the best UI you can have in your home
theater? What's the nicest display you have? It's your TV, your big screen, your projector.
That's typically called a 10 foot UI, because you're sitting 10 feet away, and if you have a large
TV, it's 10 feet large. That's a pretty good user interface. So with a control force system,
we have the on screen, can go out that video, and then you can use your two ARF remote to actually
navigate that on screen. Now, other manufacturers controllers may do some of this, or even all of
this, or none of this. Some controllers are just software. The open source ones, they're software,
and then you can buy a third party hardware that that software can talk to typically over the
network. But that's pretty typical of a controller for home automation. Control 4, we have larger
controllers with more IO, some with built-in disks. We have a smaller controller that's just
for behind the TV. There's a whole range of them, but the point is really what they do. They do
these things, okay, that we talked about. The next thing we have in an automation system is we have
devices. And there are several different kinds of devices that are typical in automation system,
but really what devices you have is limited based only on what devices are out there. I mean,
I didn't list on here at all, devices like the internet. You know, you can write drivers that
go out and grab information from the internet. That's a device in our case, what we look at is a
device. But the devices that I list here are, first of all, you have your AV devices. So all of
your, again, your stack that you have in your home theater, your TV, VCR, if anyone had one, DVD
player, iPods. Those are AV devices. We then have lighting devices or lighting systems.
In Control 4's case, we actually sell dimmers, switches, lamp modules. We sell different kinds of
dimmers to be able to do lighting. We do that because for our dealers, it's much easier for them to
just buy them from us. They're wireless. They just work. But we also interface with third-party
lighting control systems. So if you had a lighting control system, you could use those as opposed
to Control 4's. A other automation system, they do the same thing. They'll either have lights or
they'll have lights that they can interface with. They'll have drivers for different lighting
control systems. Thermostats, Control 4 produces their own Zigbee thermostat, as well as we can
interface with third-party thermostats. Security panels, contact sensors, so door and window sensors,
there's actually sensors, there's one input and one output on the back of that controller,
which you could use for garage doors, something like that, or a motorized screen.
But also there's like this right here, this is actually a contact or a relay device,
which is a third-party card access makes, which integrates with the Control 4 system. So
you put one of those out in your garage, you'll control both your garage doors. A different
device will actually have a relay that can open and close those doors. So relays and contacts
you can add as many of those to this system as you have points that need to be monitored. All right.
Again, we talked about contact sensors, relays are the same kind of thing, they're just an output.
We have phone systems, asterisk, whatever you want. You can talk to, there could be drivers for
phone systems. We have a driver that puts our little list UI on the Panasonic phones. If you have
a Panasonic phone system, it makes that a control point. And then last thing is that cameras
control 4 natively supports IP cameras and a lot of other system support IP-based cameras.
If you have analog, you can put those into an IP device, it'll spit IP out the other side
and you can use it. So without devices, obviously you don't have anything to control. So it's not
much of an automation system if you just have a controller and nothing to control it with or control
with it. The next thing we have is I talked about this a little bit before. An automation system
has communications. It has to be able to communicate to different kinds of devices that are located
on different types of networks. And this is just a few of them. We have infrared, like I talked
about before, serial Ethernet devices, both wired and Wi-Fi devices. We also have ZIG-B or Z-Wave
that are wireless technologies. ZIG-B is what control 4 uses natively. And it's a little different
from Wi-Fi in that it's a mesh network. As you know with Wi-Fi, if you have your access point
and you walk your laptop a certain distance away, it slows down and a certain more, it slows down
and then you're off the network. With ZIG-B or other mesh network systems, every single device within
the system can be a repeater for the system. So for example at my house I have a light that's actually
outside on my kid's playground that's about 30 feet back from the house. Well the controller is
actually in the basement of my house. It's not likely that those two could talk directly to each
other. So that light out in the backyard can actually talk to a light probably in the garage or
in the back of the house somewhere that will relay that onto the controller. The nice thing with
the ZIG-B as well as other mesh networks, the more devices you have, the stronger your network is.
Now it's not necessarily the faster your network is because if you're hopping for a device device,
there is some latency there. But ZIG-B actually was optimized not for throughput. It was optimized
for very small amounts of data to be very reliably sent from point to point. And really if you're
thinking about the devices that use ZIG-B, they're actually sending messages that are like the light
is at 50% or the light is off or someone pushed this button down there. Things like that are very small
messages. That's what ZIG-B is optimized for is reliability. The next thing you have is the thing
that the homeowner actually sees most often. And that's the user interface of the system.
That the user interface of the system could be just about anything. I mean it could be a on-screen,
like we talked about before, it could be a remote. So here's Control-4 has a two-way ZIG-B remote.
So you can actually interface with the system through the remote and that's all you need.
Like my kids' rooms, they have the version, an earlier version of this remote. They can select
their music with it. If you hit this little list button, you can actually navigate through and
change your lights or turn your lights on or your lights off or whatever you want. Through this
list interface, that's a very simple UI. You also have key pads in Control-4. Now I had to
lower this. I don't have a very long cable to take it over there. But in this case, this is a three-button
keypad. Control-4 has six-button keypads, two-button keypads. We have an LCD keypad that's less
expensive than a touch panel. We then move up to touch panels, which we have like this
three-and-a-half-inch touch panel down here or this seven-inch touch panel up here.
Again, it's just UI. The user interface that the user can interact with the system.
And the last thing is you have a lot of automation systems also have a web UI or
some flash-based UI or even a PC-based UI. Okay? Sometimes this is rolled into the controller.
Sometimes this is separate. Control-4 system, they're actually all separate. The UI devices
talk to the controller over the network or the keypads. They talk to the controller over Zigbee.
Okay, it just depends. That's something else you can look at is just what the UI of the system is.
Some of them have very simple UI. Some of them have very complicated UIs. At Control-4,
we actually want to create it so that you can install a system as a dealer,
anything for very simple UI, all the way up to a very nice touch screen UI,
which is obviously more expensive. Okay? The nice thing about Control-4 is the controller
actually comes with the on-screen UI. So if you're just automating like a home theater,
you already have your UI. You don't have to buy a touch panel. You don't have to buy other
things within the system. Come fun there, Jayce. All right. Okay. The last thing
that an automation system typically has is some way to set up the system. Now, in Control-4's
application, it's actually a separate app. It's a Windows app called Composer
that the installer can use to actually install the system. It talks over the network to the
controller. You set everything up the way you want it with that application. The application
doesn't run when the system is running, you know? You can take it away, walk off,
and the controller keeps controlling without the setup application. Other systems open-source
or whatever, it can be combined with the controller. Sometimes the controller, in some case,
they have a Windows home automation system where it's an app running and Windows. How you set it
up is you interact with the app. It's just a GUI app on a PC. Some of them have web-based setups,
and some of them have a user interface based setup where you would use a touch screen or the on-screen
to do a setup. I'm sure you're familiar with that with like a Tivo or another home theater gear
is coming a lot more with a UI or a web-based setup. Okay? Those are really the different pieces
that constitute what is in most automation systems. Okay? I'm going to talk a little bit about
the open-source automation systems. Now, I don't claim to be a complete expert on open-source
automation systems. I've used some of these. I've seen them. I've looked at them. I don't
currently use any of them because obviously I work for control 4. So my system at home is a control
4 system, but I am familiar with most of what is out there. Okay? First option you have if you're
doing an open-source, do your own home automation system is you can roll your own. Okay? Rolling your
own. I mean there's a lot of different applications out there to control like X10 lighting or
in-stion lighting. There's a lurk for IR. You can get it to answer to a remote. You can get it to
send IR to different devices. You can use Cron. You can use scripting. You can do whatever you want
and actually roll your own. At my house, my Christmas lights are actually all X10. The modules are
cheap. I set up a Cron job. It turns them on at night. It turns them off in the morning. Works. I
have it send the command two or three times so it always gets through. Works just fine. I don't
use control 4 gear to do my Christmas lights. Be kind of a waste, you know. You can roll your own
with your whole automation system that way. There's enough tools out there. There's enough pieces
that you could gather them together and script whatever you want. Okay? There's actually a resource
out on the web that I have as a link at the very end. It's the only link I put because the guy has
a list of like all different kinds of automation resources. Everything from the, if you want to do
it yourself to the integrated type systems. Okay? So that's an option. The next option is there
integrated systems and there's not very many of these because obviously it's a lot of work.
There are some and there are actually three that I would talk about that I would say are probably
the the biggest home automation ones out there right now. Okay? They're all targeted a little
differently. They're all at different places in their development. That's Mr. House. There's Linux
MCE and then there's one called Open Remote. Okay? Let me talk a little bit about each of those. Mr.
House. It's an open source application. It's a very stable project. It's been around forever
and it's written in Perl. Okay? It controls all different kinds of devices. They have security
panel drivers. They have X10 drivers. They have Instion which is a different power line lighting
control system which is a little more reliable than X10. They have drivers for all kinds of
things under the sun. And again if they don't have one you can go the roll your own option at that
point. You know add it in. What are the cons? Well there's a 10-year-old Perl code base. Okay?
It's kind of a large code base so there's a bit of a learning curve there. I've never really been
a Perl guru. I ran Mr. House for a while. Got to do what I wanted to do most for the most part.
Another of the cons is it's main interface is pretty much an old CGI web style interface.
Okay? You can get to a lot of stuff in it but it's not really terribly intuitive. You know?
I would call this Mr. House what would they call the old hotness. Okay? It's not really the
current hotness but at one time it was the hotness. There are still development. There's still
development going on in Mr. House. There's still people who use it. Might be something you want to
look at. One of the things that doesn't really have is it doesn't really have that 10-foot
user interface. It doesn't have an on-screen home theater type interface. Okay? That's Mr. House.
I think it's at Mr. House.net. Again, it's in that link of links that's at the end of the
references here. The next one I talk about is Linux MCE. This actually was a commercial offering
called Pluto Home and it's still offered at some levels as commercial automation but they've
open sourced it and there's a project called Linux MCE which is the open source version of
this code base. Okay? It has a very flashy UI. As far as the on screen, you actually are using
a PC. You're hooking that PC up to the on screen so pretty graphics. It's flashy. It's colorful.
Enough flashing going on to really kind of, you know, exactly. Put you into some shock there.
Kill you if you have the right conditions. It has really good media integration. It's sort of like
a media player on steroids. That's actually its main focus is that home theater control. All right?
There's other applications that are just for video applications like MythTV for mainly TV.
There's Boxy, XBMC, other things. They don't really have an automation portion. They're just
video for this computer. Video streaming to another computer but not really automation.
Linux MCE is kind of that video front end type stuff with automation. So it actually really looks
like a very interesting, interesting product. I have not run it myself. Again, since it is a commercial
application that was opened, there is quite a code base already. It's quite a bit of a learning
curve. I don't know what it's written in. I believe it's in C or C++. What it doesn't do quite as
well is it's as some of the commercial automation systems is. It's not really a multi-room system.
It's mainly a home theater centered type system. It has automation functionality but it's mainly
for the home theater environment. It doesn't have nearly as many third party drivers for things like
security lighting and so on as for example, Mr. House has. It sort of went a different way.
The last thing which I would call a con is it's all PC-based. If you want to have a UI in this room,
you really have a PC in that room. If you want to have a UI in this room, you have a PC in this
room. That's okay but these are pretty high-end PCs and with all of that comes all of the issues
you have with PCs. They're typically loud. They're typically burn a lot of power. You can make
a quiet one that doesn't burn as much power for a little more money. It's just a different way
to go. That's my take on it. Again, all of this is my opinion. I'm not speaking for control for
and I'm not certainly an expert in all things open source automation. The last one I'm going to talk
about is actually pretty much just started. It's a project that's just started up. The people who
are doing the project actually are strong open source people. I don't remember who the main person
is. Yeah, I think it is. I don't think it's Mark Spencer. I would have to look at that. It might
be. Yeah. I thought it was a Skype guy but I don't know. I'm not sure. Anyway, you don't have to look
it up. The people who have started are actually they know about open source and they're running it
really open. I mean, they have a Twitter feed. They have the source right there that you can download.
They have chat. It's not IRC but it's still chat. They have Mark Flurry. He's done some other open
source projects. I don't remember what it is. One of the other main contributors is Neil Cherry
which has been doing Linux home automation stuff. Pretty much forever. I'm in a very long time.
So there's some very connected people, a very experienced team of people who are working on it.
Right now obviously the con is it's for the most part, vaporware. They've just got to the point
where they have a little UI designer for the iPhone where you can design and put some buttons on
it and then they can spit IR out the other end. It's a very start of where things could go. That's
open remote. One of the pros for open source project in this case. They're really a lot the same
as the pros for most open source. It's a much lower cost of entry. Obviously you download something.
You have the automation software. You can get started. You can play with it. You buy some devices.
You buy some X10 kit or you buy some contact relay type boards that are supported and you can
start doing automation right away without much outlay. You can pick the best of breed devices.
Again, if you are wanting your UI on your screen to be really flashy and fancy and smooth,
you can go a higher end. You can choose how good you want the system to be.
You can pick a really fancy lighting control system. You could go all the way down and just do X10.
Works for the most part. Not real flashy. You have control over what you pick.
It typically pays you go. You buy it as you want to buy it. The last thing is, for most part,
you have full control of the system. If something doesn't work, you're the one who gets to fix it.
On the other hand, if it doesn't have a feature you want, you can add the feature. That's a great
benefit if you're a developer. The cons for an open source project or do it yourself type project.
Each one of these projects that I talked about that are the integrated solutions. They're
really scratching their own itch. They're doing the thing that they're going at it from their
own perspective. That's really where they're at. Multi-product and vendor integration is
typically pretty difficult. Buying it all from different places and making it all work together
is sometimes a problem. Again, the learning curve we talked about. Another thing is when you say
you're building your own platform, you're going to have to source all the parts, put all the parts
together and make it work. For most of you people, that's probably not a big issue. You're not
afraid of that sort of thing. One of the biggest problems, one of the biggest cons to the open source
applications is there's a lot of different device vendors that actually will not open up their
protocols to open source projects. They don't publish their protocol. You might have this great
device that has a serial interface or an ethernet interface and you have no way to talk to it.
You have to control via IR because that's all they're going to give you is a remote control.
It sucks. I don't think it makes a lot of sense in a lot of cases, but companies will do that.
And that's the problem. Since you're an open source project, a lot of times you can sniff it,
watch what it's doing, figure it out, write the driver anyway. But it is an issue. The last thing
is probably, in my case, the one that would keep me from implementing this, has a very low
spouse approval factor. If you're doing it yourself, there's usually wires hanging out and things
are taped to the wall. It depends on your wife. They typically have a low spouse approval factor.
Now, other parts of it might not. I run myth TV at my house, my wife loves it. Things
look great. Wouldn't live without it. If you do it right, there may not be a low spouse approval
factor. That's the cons, really. Not only is there an open source versus commercial
applications split, there's also do it yourself versus professional. There's a whole range of
different applications and a range of different things you have to consider, whether when you're
talking about whether you want to do this, or you want to actually pay and have someone do it for
you. And this lovely HTML table kind of illustrates that it's pretty self-explanatory.
Really, we have four groups here. We have your universal remotes, which you guys are familiar with,
the one-for-all remote, the pronto, universal remote controls, it makes a nice little touch screen
remotes. You have your do-it-yourself slash open source solutions. Then you have what I would
call prosumer solutions. These are commercial applications that really do a lot of the functionality
as the professional automation systems, but they sell to consumers.
And the last category is what I would call the professional. These are home automation systems
that are installed by dealers with varying levels of allowing the end user to actually change
things within the system. For example, Control 4, we are dealer installed, so a dealer actually
will come and install over your gear, hook the entire rack together, make sure it all works,
but then you can actually use Composer Homeowner's Edition and do all of the programming that says
when my front door opens, play a chime throughout the house that says, hey, the front door is open.
You can do all of that functionality, all the programming on the back end, but not the initial install,
okay? AMX and Crestron are probably the two biggest automation players. They do both commercial
as well as residential. They are dealer-only, period, closed hood, sealed hood, the whole 90 yards,
okay? So that's really the scale right there. Interestingly enough, the you go from having the
very low end, the universal remote, it's a remote, it's a piece of hardware, then you have your
open source and pro-sumer are mostly software pieces. They don't manufacture any actual devices,
and then up on the professional end, it's mostly hardware again. Now obviously the hardware is
running software, but you don't see that. You actually see boxes. They're moving boxes,
there's a selling boxes that do the functionality that they do, okay? Cost, universal remote,
I put two dollar signs, but really could be one dollar sign. It depends on what you talk about for
universal remote, how much functionality it has, and so on. Open source, I still put two dollar
signs because you still have to buy some stuff, but then you also have your investment of time,
all right? The pro-sumer, you still have the time investment, but they cost a little more,
they're not an open source application to start. And the last one's professional, which could be
anywhere from a few of those dollar signs to as many dollar signs as you have, you can go
as high up as you want. Control four, we actually are trying to hit the market that people like us
could actually afford. Okay, that's our market. We don't want to be the movie star home, the basketball
player home, the, you know, high-end CEO home, that's not our target market. We do sell into that
market, but really that's the AMX and Crestron market. We actually want everything from that level
down to people who are integrating, say, just a home theater, so you're doing all of that stack.
Control four has controllers that start at 5.99, including a remote to navigate that on screen,
that would basically integrate your home theater, let you control lights, which you would then have
to purchase on top of that, but a very low entry point, and then we can go up to all the way up.
You know, that's the big differentiator for Control four. And the last thing we have is the level
of integration for those products. Universal remotes, they're not very integrated. They make
control all of your gear, the low end ones, you actually have to say, okay, receiver on whatever
on, you still have to push the same amount of buttons, you just don't have to find five remotes.
You know, the higher end of these is more integrated, the Pronto and URC, you have macro capabilities,
it's more integration, they still don't integrate security panels, lights, all those other things,
so that's why I say there's still a low integration. Do it yourself open source from ProSummer,
obviously more integration, the professional systems are a very high level of integration,
okay, they can integrate anything that can be talked to with a relay, IR serial, Ethernet,
or any other protocol pretty much, so integration level goes out. Sure, Ryan?
A little like it's a touch screen remote, yes.
There are some in what you'd call the lower end that do that, but they cost as much as
like a low end control four system does. For example, URC just put out a remote called the MX-6000,
it's a touch screen remote about this big, it's got some hard buttons on the side and a touch screen
in the middle color, it's not terribly high resolution, but you're just using it to push buttons,
so it's great little thing, it's like 1,500 bucks. It does two way, they have an iPod doc,
it'll talk with that over Wi-Fi, but it's again more expensive. I don't know if there's probably
someone in between that in between there that has that, I just don't know what it is.
Like you said, the control four remote actually has a two-way Zigbee remote, so I think it's
a pretty good deal, but that's me. I'm a little biased, I'll admit. Now I'll talk a little about
how control four does the automation. It's a little bit about control four. We're a privately
held company, I've found it in 2003. We've been shipping products since about June of 2005.
We had a first generation of products, we're now onto basically our second generation of products,
so newer controllers, newer touch screens, next revision of the dimmers and switches and all of that.
We do produce hardware, we write all of our own software and our own firmware for the devices,
it's all done internally to control four. As far as the Provo Linux users group,
a lot of the control four devices run Linux. All of our controllers run Linux on their embedded
CPUs, our touch screens all run Linux, and I believe the speaker point, so our audio output
endpoint runs Linux. Okay, yes? Yes, the controllers are an arm, they're actually a TI
DaVinci platform, which I believe is like an arm nine. It has a DSP processor included as well
to do MP3 and code decode type functionality. The older generation were an arm five, I believe it was,
didn't have a built-in DSP a little slower. The controllers, the HC300 and the 500, which is
like this with more IO, they run about, I think there are 350 megahertz, not extremely blazing fast,
but they work. And then we have a high end controller, which is the HC1000, which is basically a PC
platform that all it does is runs the controller software. So for a large, large project,
you want that guy because he runs a lot faster than me. No, that's a PC platform. We cross compile
for a lot of different platforms.
Yeah, you're asking, what point can you load it down? It really, a lot depends on the project,
depends on how many devices you have in the project. It depends on what level of audio streaming
you're doing in the project. We don't do video stream, we only do audio streaming. What we found is
you can do up to five or seven stream sessions, which could be, each one of them could be a different
audio session to multiple rooms without having playback issues. The DSP actually offloads a lot
of that functionality. Now, also if you're looking, this controller, for example, only has two audio
outs. So he's ever only going to stream two things to this particular controller. You can have
multiple controllers within the system and get additional ones. You really shouldn't, what you end
up doing is saturating the network. You know, by design, that's what it is. It's network before
that actual processor. Now, multi-room audio, if you do a traditional multi-room audio, you have an
audio switch and then it goes analog to your speakers. So you have an amplifier and then you have
speaker wire that goes to your rooms. That's what I have because I was doing automation when I built
my house. Well, in that case, when I'm listening to analog sources, the process is completely out of
the picture. He doesn't care, you know. So it's really only when you're talking traditional
audio streaming over the network that it's an issue. Wi-Fi, you can do about three different audio
streams. Is that a sure question? Okay. The control force system does let you put multiple
controllers within a project. So you can build a project up to as large as you really need it to be.
Only one of those is ever the master controller that runs the controller software. The other
is all run as slaves at that point. We talked about how control 4 does that. Really, I've shown
you a lot of the different pieces. I mean, you have the control portion of it is with the controller.
The UI portion is with a touch panel or a remote or any of those control 4 devices.
Devices control 4 has drivers, thousands and thousands of IR drivers, a lot of serial drivers
and some Ethernet drivers. We typically write most of those drivers ourselves, but we have third
parties and partners who actually write their own drivers as well. So we have drivers for a lot
of different devices. We have, trying to remember what the other things were here. We'll make
back up a little. Communication, we already talked about that. Control 4 does all of the things that
we mentioned and the setup we have a composer, which is a Windows application for doing setup.
I'll show a little of that in a little demo. It's very small demo. When we talk about the pros of
control 4, control 4 has a consistent automatic UI. When I talk about automatic UI,
if you look at the things you see on this touch panel or the things that Jace could select going
through that list on the remote, those things were put into the list or put onto the UI based on
what devices are in the project. In some other automation systems, you actually design the UI,
so you put buttons in different places and you say, well, when I push this button, it flips to a
different page and then when I push this button, it flips to a different page. I push this one
as play, stop pause. You have to actually program all of that functionality. In Control 4, a dealer
doesn't have to do that. It's all automatic. You drag in the devices into the project, you tell Control
4 how those devices are connected and then in Control 4 builds the UI and then manages path
selection and power management for you automatically. So for example, let's say I have my remote,
where did that remote make it to? Oh, you're trying to take it home. Okay, let's say I have the
remote and I fire up my UI. I don't have an input on the projector, so I can't really show you. But
when I hit that UI, I'm going to see a UI that's very similar to this right here. Let me back this up
first. The UI is consistent because it's similar if not the same UI on the touch panels,
including this little mini touch down here, as well as on that on screen. Okay, this is actually
the 7-inch UI. This is the same as this touch panel, but the on screen looks just like it and use
the remote to navigate it. So that's what I mean by consistent. But let's say I use my remote
and I come in here and I want to choose a video and I come in and choose CoverArt. Now I only
put in like five movies because obviously this isn't hooked up to a changer. Let's say I choose a
movie and I hit Play Movie. In the Control Force system, the system automatically knows how to get
to that media to your current location. Because for example, right now I am in the theater room. Okay,
see up here at the top. So the Control Force system says, okay, for the theater room, I need to turn
on this TV. I need to turn on the receiver. I need to set the receiver to this input to get to
those videos on the changer. I need to turn the changer on and then I need to start the movie playing.
Well, the Control Force system does all of that without an installer having to write a macro
to do it. It knows how to do all of that. That's what I mean by the automatic path selection
and power management. Okay, another probe Control Force is it does media management. So if you have
music, I don't have actually a local music, but I have Rhapsody here. So if I look at Rhapsody,
it manages your own music the same way as it's showing this Rhapsody music. You know, you can choose
it by cover art, you can choose it by artist, you can choose it by album. It does the media management
built into the controller. So with a very small controller, small outlet, you get the media management
along with these other things. Control Force and other probe does allow homeowner programming,
although like I said before, it's not the actual install of devices. It's everything after that
point you can do as a homeowner. Control Force is a full featured system. So we do actually
integrate with all of those five things that I talked about the home theater, multi-room audio,
lighting, security, HVAC. Control Force has a very large driver database. We have a large
dealer database. So if you want to do a Control Force system, it's dealer installed. You want to
go with the system that has a lot of dealers to choose from because the quality of dealers does
vary. Now you want to go with one who works for you. Mature APIs because we've been around a while
like say the second revision of product, driver, API, second revision. It's really good. And the
last thing is Control Force has a very high spouse approval factor because again, the initial installs
all done by someone who does this all the time. So they're the racks that our installers make.
The back of the rack is just as pretty as the front. All the wires just go beautifully and
they flow and it's just it's a pretty thing. You stop laughing at me. It's a thing of beauty.
The cons for Control Force are that well, first of all, it is a higher cost than to do it yourself
or open source solution. It's a higher cost. In some cases, not all cases than an approaching
resolution. But it's a good value for quality is what we think. The other con is especially for
this crowd, you might look at this as a con as it is a dealer installed system. If you guys want
to do it yourself, that's really not an option for a Control Force system. I don't doubt that
I don't know if I'd say all of you, but most of you in the room probably could set up
an automation system. You could set up a Control Force system with training. But unfortunately,
that's just not offered at this point in time. So that's a con from your perspective.
The last thing I want to talk about are some examples of automation. And these are all things
that I do currently in my house. Just some what ifs. What do I want an automation system for?
Type examples. The first thing I have is I do lighting on my porch. When we built our house,
we have a really large, long porch. That's my wife wanted so we could sit out and gock at the
neighbors or something. So I have lighting on my porch that my house lights come on at a certain
time. It's like 30 minutes after sunset. And they go off at 12.30. That's a timed lighting on my
porch. I also have a motion sensor on my porch. So if you walk up to the porch, those lights ramp up.
Because obviously the lights don't come up full brightness all night long. They come up to
like about 10 or 20% until you walk up and then they come up. In my house I have automatic
walkaround lighting. So at night time, there's an auto light functionality that have motion sensors
throughout the house. And as I walk through the house, this for example is a third party motion
sensor by card access. As I walk around, there's programming that I've created that will ramp lights
up as I walk around. Now if I stop moving, there's a timer as part of that functionality. If I
haven't moved for 10 minutes, it'll shut off that group of lights. It has shut lights off on me
before. But saves electricity. I don't ever walk around in the dark. If I open my garage doors,
it opens a path all the way up through the stairs. So you know, there's safety issue there as well.
The last thing I do with the lighting is I actually have a, but actually tracks which lights are
on in the house. And then I can see on one of my keypads, I have a six button keypad that I have
three floor them off with a single push. I can turn all the lights on on a floor if I tap it four
times. So let's say I heard something and wanted all the lights to be on. I can do that.
This is just a driver and it's like an agent that does that functionality with the control
force system. It's very, very nice. The next example are my garage. I do have both sensors on my
garage doors and I control my garage doors within the automation system. I'm kind of paranoid
about leaving my garage door open because we never lock the door in between the garage and the
house ever, ever, ever. And even if you did, if someone gets into your garage, there's usually
tools in the garage that'll help you get into the house, okay? So my garage door is closed,
I guarantee it. I also have a security system. Anyway, in my house, I have two buttons on my six
button keypad which show the status of the garage door. If they go red, if the garage door is open,
they are black or off if the garage doors are closed. I can see how the corner of my eye is
walking around if that garage door is open. So I can go push the button and close the garage door,
okay? And the last thing is my house has the garage turned and it faces the side and I come out
and drive off this way. And I don't like leaving that door open like I said. So I programmed it so
that once both of those doors are closed, it'll actually turn the lights on my front porch on,
my carriage lights. So even the middle of the day, I can come out, pull out of my driveway,
I look back and if the lights are on, I know those doors are closed. And then it actually then
slowly ramps those lights down over like two minutes so they don't stay on all day. That's
garage door type automation. Multi-room audio. I built my house when I worked for a previous
automation company so I ran wire all over the place. So I have speaker wire in all my rooms,
keypad wiring. So I actually do have a full multi-room audio system in my house. It's kind of nice.
Kids have remotes to choose their stuff. I have touch panel to choose my stuff.
All the bedrooms, offices, family room have multi-room audio. Clint.
I can turn it off. They don't have to use in their rooms, first of all. But I could turn their
audio off, yeah, from anywhere. I could program it so I have a lock out button and I push that
every time they try and turn it off. It just locks them out. Yeah. You could do that. I think it's
better to like teach them. Just me, you know. Just give me a hard time. Just give me a hard time.
Oh, I know. Video management. I do have a Sony 400 disc changer which Control 4 used to sell.
I also can play video files through my myth TV box. All of those are managed by Control 4.
The system, when you're using the system, you can't tell a difference between a video file and
the discs. So to choose a movie, I come over and hit videos and I usually go to CoverArt.
Normally this would have a whole lot more titles in it. It scroll down, you know, alphabetical.
Well, I see CoverArt. I can see all the details. I can choose one to play. I can do whatever I want.
Well, all of the data actually came from AMG Music Service, which is included with the controller.
So if I add a disc, I just type in the name, hit OK to my disc changer and it's done.
If I add movies that are on my myth TV box, they show up in the same place. They show up in this exact
same list. They're the benefit of that is my five-year-old can start his own movie.
The drawback of that is my five-year-old can start his own movies, OK?
He actually picks up their remote. He pushes the four button in the middle. This is actually with
Control 4, the four button actually calls for the on-screen. That's all you need to know to start
a Control 4 system. You push that, you get the UI, you navigate it with these five buttons,
picks up, and it just starts. So that's kind of nice.
Miscellaneous examples. Color ID, timers. I do some other functionality here. Like I log all of my
colors to my my SQL database. I can look them up on the web. The driver actually comes through
the Control 4 system. It's a serial driver, but then sends it to my database.
I have bathroom timers, so when you turn on a fan in the bathroom, it'll turn off in five minutes.
If you tap it twice, it'll stay on for 30 minutes. So if you had a shower or something,
you want to run longer. Yeah, yeah. I actually have the wrong person using the bathroom. You want
to double tap that. I have reading timers in my kids room, so if I say, OK, you guys can read for
half an hour. I go to their screen and I hit it half an hour. It ramps their lights up.
30 minutes later, it actually slowly ramps it down to 20% and a minute after that shuts it off.
I don't ever get complaints because they know it's going to shut off because it ramps the lights
down. You know, it's just really nice. I do weather functionality, IP cameras. I have a camera on
my porch and then I do photo screen saver. All of the control 4 screens,
remotes, you can set them up to actually do screen saver functionality when they're not being used.
My wife really likes that. I really like that. Look around. I'll see a picture of
vacation or something and remember that. It's kind of sweet. Those are early examples of some
of the things that I do with the automation in my house. Can there be too much automation?
I think yes, there can. There's a site here. BYR.NL. It's in the Netherlands. It's run by
Peter Newmer's and he actually, Demodica is actually what they call home automation in most of Europe.
Okay, so he runs this automation forum in Europe. He logs all kinds of stuff. You pull up his page.
You can see graphs about things like the power, real-time usage of power for some devices on
socket level. You can view his cameras. You can tell when the mailbox was opened. Gas usage,
water usage, hot water usage. You can tell when all of his appliances turn on or off. Temperature
and humidity. These are all okay. I'm kind of okay with most of those. His scale is hooked up
to his automation system and logged to the database and you can see how much four people in his
house weigh. That's a bit much, I think. And last one, he actually has logged to his database.
How often the toilets are flushed? I think that's maybe a bit of a line, but that's just me.
And there are graphs of this on his website. All of this stuff. I'm not kidding you.
So for people who are conscious of why you're trying to figure out how much water you can
sink around. Yeah. Then are weight conscious or whatever. These are really great things. Sure.
Most of them would not post it on the internet, but yeah, other than that, I agree.
I think you can share real estate data and give statistics in a way that it can be anonymous,
it doesn't really matter, but the benefit is that you can give statistics to a real world,
you know, it's not as bad as being prepared to be. We don't go to the bathroom all that often,
we do wheeled inflationary times a day. There are certainly times and reasons that you might
want to log this data. There's actually some specific markets where this kind of data is very
appropriate. For example, elder care. There are some people who use control for as a basis for
an elder care type solution where you have motion sensors in this person's house and grandma's house.
You'll have a reminder that I'll tell her to take her pills. You can set up a system monitor.
If she hasn't moved around for a while, you know, you can check on her. You can have the cameras.
You could do these things. Maybe they have to weigh in to tell if she's eating or whatever.
There are reasons for doing these kind of things, but for your everyday house, maybe a bit far.
But that's just me, and I'm a little automation crazy anyway. So, yes, Ryan?
I think you've kind of brought up a good point. I don't know if you're going to address it,
or if you're on images. When you look at, for example, let's say you just look at
a lot of media of lights. It has a thinning study, or if you're looking for anything,
figure out how much money you like to go out and save it for a time. If you want to be in lighting,
the person just thinks that you're going to want to be involved.
There certainly is savings to using automated lights. Control-4 doesn't have any studies on how
much that is. Some lighting manufacturers do studies on that. The amount of power used is
pretty linear to the amount you're dimming. I put Control-4 dimmer with a light on a kilowatt
energy meter that I have. They're pretty cheap, little, devising by 20, 30 bucks. You plug
anything into it. It'll tell you how much power it's using. It was pretty linear. If you have
a 100 watt bulb, 100 percent is a little over 100 watts because you have dimmers adding a little
bit as you ramp it down. It's pretty linear. It has how many watts you're using.
Well, you can calculate out how many watts it is. Just count the bulbs and how long it's on and
what your power usage is. I have actually that little driver I created. It's a light usage agent.
It actually creates a page in my system where I can see how many watts are currently being used
just by lighting in the house and an estimate as to how much that costs me per hour.
So, I mean, I can tell if I turn all of it on, I'm a couple bucks an hour, three bucks an hour.
If I turn most of the time it's 20, 30 cents an hour at night time, most of the time when I only
have my auto lights on or it's not very much. So, you can do that kind of functionality with an
automation system, certainly with control for likely with most of them.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of it depends on your usage pattern.
Knowing your usage pattern is going to be different. If you're the kind of person who leaves your
lights on all day, every day, all night, yeah, you know exactly how much you're using. Most people
aren't that way already. So, it's kind of hard to say, you know. It is nice that I know that in my
house, every light goes off at 12.30 a.m. Sometimes when I'm sitting there, but all the lights get
turned off. I can push one button and turn off all the lights. So, it's nice. I don't know I'm
probably not paying for the whole automation system with that, but I am saving something.
You'll probably save more if you went to fluorescent, but then you have fluorescent. They're
typically not dimmable. So, I'm hoping that the LED things they come out with, that they're
coming out with, will be more dimmable, because they're more efficient than fluorescent and a lot
nicer light than fluorescent. So, that's what I'm hoping. I'm going to just do a little quick demo.
That side I talked about has like everything about Linux Home Automation. It's www.LinuxHA.com.
That's Home Automation not high availability, but LinuxHA. That's actually Neil Cherry's site,
and he's one of the contributors to Open Remote. He has a huge resource page of the
kinds of automation applications that are out there. Control 4, www.control4.com, obviously,
for more information about Control 4 system itself. I've kind of shown you a little bit about
the demo here. What I'm showing you here is called Win Navigator. This is navigators what we call
our UI. It's a Qt-based UI that we build a version for Windows, for testing, and for use by PQA
and so on, but we actually don't release that to the homeowner. It's actually not quite right.
Under Windows, it doesn't run quite right. There are things wrong with it, and we've never
wanted to invest the time to actually release that as a product, but I can show you on the big screen
where I can't do that with a touch panel. So, the nice thing about the Control 4 is a consistent
UI. If you want to do certain things, they're always going to be in the same place.
They're always the same way on this list on the remote. They're listening to the same type of
categories. I don't actually have a radio hooked up here, but the radio would just be radio stations
tuner. My wife uses a lock. She likes to win stuff on the radio, but I don't. Music, we have a
couple different categories. Major categories of digital audio. Like you were asking about
for streaming audio, that's all under this category. MP3 is located somewhere on the network.
That's all under here. I'm going to just minimize this. It doesn't keep moving around.
You can choose my library. Pick, again, I don't actually have any tunes. These are actually all
wrapped the myartists, but this is basically how you pick media. Whether it's on a smaller touch
panel, whether it's on the mini touch, it all works the same way. I picked something. Let's say
I want to start something playing. I hit play. It actually changes here, down here, to digital audio.
I was on the 4-in-a-disk changer because I was watching a movie. Now I'm listening to something.
In our case, it's going to start playing that, but that's playing that on this. It's called
speaker point. It's an audio end point device that's hooked up to the network with the controller.
So it's streaming from Rhapsody in this case, down to the controller, and then streaming out
over to my audio end points. Then, at this point, I have control over it. I can bump up my volume.
I can mute it, so on and so forth. I can play a different thing. I can look at my Q.
Media management is pretty similar. Most systems run about the same way for media management.
Don't know what else to show that. Other than the Rhapsody integration,
so let's say you want to pick an artist here. Anyone want to pick an artist?
Go look for an Rhapsody. Obscure, odd. Come on.
Skunk? Yeah. I don't know if they're in there. Brazilian might be a little...
Right there. No results found. Looks like they're not. So they must have some info on them.
Yeah, I'm not sure why that is. So I like little Hawaiian music, so pull up some is here.
There is Rhapsody integration. You have to still pay a Rhapsody fee, unfortunately.
So I don't usually use this at my house, but it's kind of nice. That's actually
we're listening to Jack Johnson and Rhapsody as well. So the only difference between your library,
the Rhapsody library is how fast it will start to play, basically, and you don't have to pay for
your own library, you know. So that's digital music. If we go to zones page, zones is actually how we
can manage different parts of the house listening to the same thing. So I can actually say,
I want everyone in the house to listen to the same thing, and then it will actually put
digital audio on all those zones. I'm not going to do that because we really don't have multiple
zones, but you can adjust the volume for individual zones or for all the zones. You can shut
all the music off. That's the zones page. Control 4 also has integration with iPods.
In this case, we have this dock. It's made by a company called the iPort. Control 4 now,
we have our own dock as well. It's a standalone dock, not an in-wall like the iPort.
With that, you're actually navigating the menu on the iPod. So what we're seeing here is the same
as you would see if you're running the iPod. So it's actually a serial interface so we can get a
little ahead of it sometimes. But we can pick a song and drill down just like you do on the iPod,
start something playing, then switch the sourced iPod, take a store now playing page,
start playing that. Again, it's not quite immediate because it's streaming that over the network.
That's the iPod. TV channel selection. You can download the media for what channels you have.
We'll put the pages on. It'll put all the graphics. You don't have to actually find those
typically. But if you want to find a channel, don't remember the number. It's pretty easy.
You can also astrate to the TV, but I'm not going to click that because then it'll stop the iPod playing.
And the last thing like we showed before, we can either go straight to the changer if something's
already playing, or we can use that cover art, browse, see what details about a movie you can...
You don't play the cross-dusturing scene. What's that?
Let me cross the streets. That's what you're going to change.
Oh, well, unfortunately, I don't actually have a disk changer here, so sorry, I don't know
on Ghostbusters. Are you able to actually rip your movies and put them on a hard drive and
provide that way? You can, yes. That's actually Control 4 currently doesn't sell a media player.
You'd have to use a net gear or a popcorn hour, or in my case, I use Myth TV to play the movie.
Technically, it uses VLC in my case, but yeah, you can have a player. Control 4, as far as it
cares about, if there's a video player, there's a URL to that actual file. That's what it keeps track
of. It's the URL of the file. Since the URL of the player says, here, play that. It says, okay,
now pause, now play, now stop. Control 4 system just controls whatever that video end point is at
that point. Does that make sense? We then have things like the comfort, so I control my thermostat
up here. It's a Zigbee thermostat. I can change it to just heat. It's not 78, it's not quite warm enough,
so, or I can turn my fan on. So, you can do this anywhere in the house. If you have multiple
systems, multiple thermostats, so we'll show you the right one for the room that you're in currently.
You can set wakeups. Wakeup consists of an audio and lighting that you want to happen,
so you can have your lights ramp up when it's wake up time. You can have your music start playing.
All with this user interface, just say, I want to wake up. You can set these up in the system
at 1 a.m. That's perfect. So, you also have light control. In this case, it's just the lights in
this room, which I don't think that light's actually hooked up, but I also can hit lighting scenes
to all lights off. I can edit lighting scenes. I can add lights to scenes all through this user
interface. Under house, we have things like contacts. So, I can see if the doors open or closed,
motion sensor, garage doors, security system. So, we actually host a virtual keypad in the
control-force system, so you can actually interact with it as if it were a security system keypad.
Last thing we have cameras, this doesn't look very great right now, but this is actually my front
porch camera, and this is one of the places where the wind nav is screwed up because buttons
are missing over here. So, you can't really see that, but I can come on pan over here and look
to the left on my porch and see my neighbor's house. I need a creepy, I can catch the doorbell
ditchers, because as soon as the doorbell ditchers come to the door, the lights on the porch turn up,
you know, and then the camera catches them. So, I think we have a few of the neighbor kids who
doorbell ditch our house just because they can be on the camera. So, you also can do web images
on here, so I can see the current weather conditions in Canada. I didn't actually set this system
up. I just tweaked a little, I didn't put this in, but remote cameras, this one's somewhere in
Canada, again, very exciting parking garage view, and that's about it. Info tabs actually more
setup type functionality, so you know, setup what you want on the screen saver. Oh, this is
when navigator doesn't have a screen saver. Anyhow, so that's the user interface. The user
actually interacts with this most of the time. When we talk just a very short time about the setup
software, this is Composer Pro. It actually is a Windows application, so our dealers actually use
if they have a Mac, they have to use parallels or they have to use a virtual machine. I use a
virtual machine on my desk factor on this. Over here, we have rooms, floors, and devices basically,
and then for those devices, we can add new devices over here, which are like new rooms and stuff,
we can add new controllers, remote touch screens, AV devices like TVs and projectors and so on,
contact and relay sensors, thermostats, cameras. We just actually just drag a device over here or
double click for a device. Let's say I have a camera I want to add. Just click it and it shows up
over here. I can come in and change its properties, so setup how I get to that camera, the IP address
and so on. Connections, I'm not really going to talk about media, you can actually come in and
here's where you set up what movies are in your changer or what channels there are in your cable
system. Programming, this is where you say when something happens, I want something else to happen,
so you pick a device and then you get it's like motion sensor. When the motion sensor senses motion,
do something. When it stops sensing motion, do something else. So in this case, it looks like
the person set this up has a grandpa motion count. They want to keep track of grandpa's moving around.
So this is what the where the commands and conditionals go and over here are where you get those.
So let's say if the motion, there's motion happening, you want to turn a light on. I want to set
ramp a light over six seconds up to say 44%. Boom, it's done. Let's say I only want to do that if the
light is off. I can say if the light is off, then ramp it up to 44. Very simple drag and drop type
programming. Again, the homeowner can do this level of programming after the system's installed.
Are there any questions about that? Let me show you one other fun little driver I wrote the other day.
Just in anticipation of you guys here. If you go to the C4 bot channel on free node right now,
it won't be hooked up later, but if I go like lights on, there's a driver running on here that's
logged into IRC, listening to commands that are being sent. Well, he got that lights on command.
He fired an event within the system. That event within the system, I told it to fire off that
particular thing. If you get lights off, right now you have to actually do it light,
right capitalization, everything. It's a little wonky still. It's not very smart. So Clint just
turned our lights off remotely. What you can do are lights on, lights off, you can do room commands.
So you actually can do room, pulse, ball up. I typically would not leave this running in my house.
Actually, it has been running for the past weeks since I started playing with this, but now it's
not. Now this one's logged in. It's a driver I wrote in the control for system. Control for has
what's called driver works now, which is like basically my project to allow dealers and partners
to create drivers. So they didn't have to use C++ and C sharp and QT to develop driver.
They actually develop drivers in Lua. So it's a Lua section embedded in our driver file.
So this is actually just a little teeny Lua bot, a little teeny IRC bot written in Lua inside
of a control for driver. So it's kind of fun. So there's a lot of fun stuff you can do with it.
All of these devices, or most of these devices, communicate over the network using a soap protocol,
so you can you can get in and do a lot of fun little things. It is hackable, although control
for currently doesn't publish that protocol, other partners and dealers, and it is still pretty
hackable anyhow. That's about all I have. That's about all the demo I have. Are there any other questions?