Homegate and third party touchscreen.

Hi to all. Am about to do the fit off on a long running project. Was originally speced to have a B&W touchscreen, customer has since gone of this idea and would like something " bigger and more colourful " but is not happy with the price of the colour touch screen. Was thinking of suggesting to him a third party touch screen and Homegate but thought I would ask here of other peoples experience with this. Has anyone done this? Was the outcome satisfactory? Anything to watch out for?

Thanks.

 

LG touch screen

Gday im running a lg 15" lcd touch screen they also come in 17" im also running homegate v3.9 on a clone pc using a serial pci which was working great until my pc crashed now im running a new pc with one serial port and having problems with connection to the serial pci (not conecting all the time mabe works twice out of 50 atempts) my next move is to buy a network cni set up through a wireless router so i can run home gate via laptop.

 

Lg

Ive had nothing but trouble with LG 15" touch screens they fail every 16 months and have usb control very cheap end product always having some major faults with them as far as i am concerned LG stands for LOW GOODS. Try NEC, 3m or even Saharh web tablets they work well.

 

Peter, I guess what people are saying, is that there is no problems from the software side of things (Homegate, or a non CBus alternative you might want to look at is CQC (Charmed Quark)).

The main thing you need to look at is reliable hardware that is capable of 24/7 operation, and will stand up to use and abuse.

I can second Nathan on how cheap and nasty the LG touch screens are. When they aren't flat out dying left right and centre, they are losing calibration way too often. Not a product that I would recommend to anyone. Have seen one company who's IT department made the screen calibration software one of the main buttons on their POS software (And by main, I mean a very large button in case the screen was WAY out of calibration), simply because the LG touch screens were losing calibration so often that the staff had to do it themselves every couple of weeks just to continue being able to use them.

Rant over

Oh, and if you have a look at CQC and you like it, it would pay to talk to Rohan (rhamer) on here, as he's out resident expert on the software, and from memory, I believe he wrote the CBus driver for it.

HTH, Darpa

 

I've never liked the use of 3rd party homegate display interfaces, it usually costs more to actually program than actually purchasing the screen in the long run. you're still probably better to get a monitor with a custom overlay and run Schedule plus on it; Like we've done on a 42" Plasma + 3M overlay l... less headache having not to reboot a 3d party system every 2 friggin dayss

 

I don't agree with that statement at all.

you are entitled to your opinion though, as am I.

Mick

 

But if you've Totally Intergrated a system then you'd either packaged it into you Control System solution anyway, your lighting system would be controlled via your Total Solutions Controller ie. AMX, Crestron, RTi

 

Perhaps I can hijack this thread with another "third party" question. This time, it's about a panel PC. Specifically this one. Hypothetically speaking, if I had one of these with the option of embedded XP and a V4 dongle plugged into a USB port, would I be able to run HomeGate?

Assuming the answer is yes (and this is probably more an XP embedded question than a HomeGate one), would I need to fit a hard drive or would I get away with running everything in RAM and/or the memory card?

 

Ashleigh,

Many thanks for taking the time to write all that. There is lots in there which I didn't know - I am reasonably computer literate, but this would be a first adventure into "embedded".

That lot is, I think, sending me down the line of looking for a quiet 2.5" disk drive and going for a "proper" XP install rather than embedded.

Indeed - and my "world" is already behind ISA Server which will help too.

It is home use for me, so not too much of an issue - still very good points though.

Bottom line, a colour touch screen starts to look more interesting - and if this was for a customer I think I'd fight the "but it's only a small screen" argument with everything that you have said above. As it's only for me, I think the risks are manageable - although I'm shying away from XP(e) now.

Some of my longer term plans which [might] involve more than just HomeGate also point towards the need for a disk drive, so I think that decision is actually making itself.

Once again, many thanks for the pointers. I suspect that you have saved me from a lot of grief.

Nick

 

If it's just for you and you are not developing a product then definitely stay away from XPe. I worked on the original prototype of the Colour C-Touch several years ago and XPe is a pain. Basically Microsoft have this small team (relatively) that take the normal XP and then try and brake it down into components so you can mix and match bits. In practise you soon findout that Windows is one big pile of spaghetti dependencies. You try innocently to add a small feature and suddenly the Xpe builder requires you to pull in 250MB of other **** like Outlook Express, because some weird feature is dependant on some DLL that OExpress uses and has to be bundled with it. You find that getting basic stuff working correctly is hard unless you basically just ship the whole XP.

I would recommend for personal use to use XP and XPLite ( http://www.litepc.com ) to tear it down to a mangeable size.

XPe works by having a build comfiguration tool on your development PC. From this you install driver packages for you hardware and then pick and match you components, basically designing your OS. Then you go through a process of validating the design, then it builds an OS image. Then you copy that image to the target hdd, then you make the drive bootable via another means (boot cd etc..) then you boot and the image goes thorugh a initialisation phase, then finally you reboot into the unactived OS, then you activate the OS and then reboot into the running OS.

Then you test and if everything is not perfect you start the process again. In all it can take an hour just to run up a simple change to your image like a registery key value change.

Noe the process may have improved somewhat over the last few years since I did this, but based on Ashlieghs curses and rants I have heard I suspect not.

Windows XPe is the way to go if you are building a mass market product that simpley must use the Windows OS. If you are building one offs, then stay away to protect your sanity.

Also I believe you would need to purchase the XPe configuration software seperate to your XPe license which only allows for running windows on the device but not building OS images.

 

Thanks Ashleigh and Richo --- quite probably saved me a good deal of pain and money there!

 

cmon nick, and ashleigh did his sales pitch so elegantly, but still you didn't buy a CTC

 

I know!

I would love one, but am struggling to justify the cost. I also have a SWMBO issue in that the Mrs wants a bigger screen so that we can see CCTV images from the other side of the room.......

On the XP(e) issue, I have just had a long chat with the panel PC people. They actually agree that for a "one off" and for someone that will want to install things (aka play about) XP Pro and a hard drive is the way to go.

They did not try to push me down the XP(e) path.

 

Time for an update

I now have a Panel PC. Having listened to Ashleigh, Richo and friends, I have chosen the hard drive option (rather than XPe) and have a full copy of Windows XP SP3 installed. I also chose the 1.5Ghz processor.

HomeGate works like a dream (and will be even better when I finally receive my copy of V4 and get rid of the demo timeouts).

SWMBO is delighted with the appearance of the unit on the lounge wall. She is particularly impressed by HomeGate's ability to control the Lounge Squeezebox (more on that to come in another thread).

Panel PC wise, I think I have made the right choice of unit. I cannot fault the pre-sales advice given by Wordsworth - very knowledgeable and able to understand the peculiarities of life from the perspectives of a) home automation and b) a techie wanting to have fun!

Ashleigh and Richo, thanks again for your help.

Nick

 

Colour C-Touch

Am afraid I chickened out and have convinced the customer to go with a new Colour touch screen. Once he started talking about the cheap touch panels he had seen on ebay and the old computer his brother in law was getting rid of I saw sense in back pedalling and installing a product I knew would be reliable.