HouseBot

Am I reading the hardware list correctly and there is no UPB support with Housebot. I certainly capable of overlooking the obvious?

You read right. There is no UPB support in HB. (Insteon, X10, Z-wave are supported)

Victor

My interest has been in Z-Wave, but there is so little happening with it, I'm beginning to wonder if it has a future.

As a result, I began taking at least a passing glance at UPB, but if Housebot doesn't support it, that sort of puts a damper on that.

I have a lot of trouble getting any interest up in Insteon given Smarthome products very checkered past.

I guess it's more waiting and watching before adapting a new protocol to replace X-10.

Deane

Where are you located?

Here in Europe we also have FS20. It's a German system and not supported bij HouseBot, but the protocol stack was available so I wrote my own driver. Works perfectly on all my HVAC, lights and appliences (and more). Over 50 devices are wirelessly bi-directionally communicating with HouseBot giving me full control and status on all devices.

Just saying that there are option even though HB doesn't seem to natively support it.

I'm in the U.S. Richard.

OK, that rules out FS20.

UPB seems like a straightforward protocol on a bit level. Should be fairly easy to write a driver even in vbscript. However, I know that doesn't help you much. Unless you are into programming and understand how to build bytes containing the right info on a bit level the only thing you could do is put up a feature request for Scott to write a native driver. Not sure if anybody else on this forum uses UPB with HouseBot. I for sure don't have the devices and don't think I will ever revert to anything that looks like X10. I just read on wiki that UPB is supposed to be much better than X10 ever was but it still is probably going to be bad over long distances using multiple groups of power with devices such as PC's that produce static on the power line.

Sorry and good luck!

Thanks Richard. The reason I have leaned toward Z-Wave is to get away from the power line. The only thing that has given me second thoughts is that Z-Wave seems to have plateaued, with not much happening. We live in a world where you either move forward, or you fail. There is no standing still.

I guess I need to wait and watch a little longer.

I had to choose between Z-Wave and FS20 at the time. In Europe Z-Wave uses a different frequency and there are/were not as many devices available as is in the US. What I did like was the way it works. Every new devices increases the bubble.
FS20 however was cheap, very easy to get, very wel assorted and is still expanding it's product line. So that was easy. FS20 is unidirectional when it comes to dimmers and appliance switches but a so called repeater device returns the status to the PC making it bi-directional again. I guess my HB setup is about 95% able to control the devices at the first burst. Over time I just coded around that problem by sending some messages twice.
My alarm turns off all the lights. Sometimes that didn't work so now it simply turn them off twice with a 5 second delay. 100% full proof these days but it took some time to get there..

I don't have any knowledge about Insteon other than it seems to work but you are hesitant...
Just wait and see if you have a working X10 set right now.