The responses to a post stating this industry needing decent reverse engineering tools and a proposed vision of where I believe the industry is going to be driven in terms of the urc product line away from proprietary technology that ties you to specific installers that are capable of disappearing due to market force was interesting.  The comment about my throwing my credentials around was particularly interesting when I just tried to defend that I have some knowledge in the area drove some particulary interesting remarks.

What you think of me or my comments are immaterial, the test of time will tell which is correct.  I will provide for you consideration one of the products that have arrived in the marketplace which support my position.  This is a first generation device that will have all the intersting challenges of first generation hardware but this device signals the capability to move away from th proprietary capabilities of devices such as the MSC400 and move them out to where developers can work to address some of the concerns I raised.

[Link: asihome.com]

I am sure anyone with any vision at all realizes the value in the MSC400 type of equipment isn't in its control lines and signalling capability but rather in the database of all the  discrete codes of the devices.  Handheld devices carrying GB of ram with access to incredible amounts of storage (cloud), will create the environment I spoke of.

Any competent engineer wlll tell you the best way to increase the reliability of any platform (multiple systems working together to avchieve a specific goal) is to remove as many devices as possible.  Simpler appliances, such as the one I provided the link for developers to use the capabilities of the real network stack to move capability to the place htat can best serve it.

The reason the MSC400 is forced to use its smart macros and triggers is because the RF and IR communications built into the remotes have ZERO communication reliability built into them.  You rely on shorter signal bursts that that have a higher probability of arriving uncorrupted to trigger complex actions to happen inside a device (MSC 400).

Any programmer worth a damn knows whether the receiving device received the reuqest and has numerous mechanisms to deal with errors unlike the remote configuration.  The cloud and wan capabiity is only required for configuration and lans configured correctly are incredibly reliable and becoming more so daily.