ControlThink Forums

Work with Melloware - maker of ZWave Commander - to give access to the scene information in the ThinkEssentials database. My understanding is that there is no API to get scene data and that your DB is encrypted. I bought ThinkEssentials and ThinkStick SOLEY because of ZWave Commander. You will only further drive your sales by helping ZWave Commander be a better product. Forgive me if this is not the right section of the forum to be posting this

Considering that this is your first post coupled with how specific it is in its focus..... I'll take it at face value and agree that enhancing TE to allow for control of a ZWave network via a smartphone application would be immensely powerful and raise TE's profile by a few orders of magnitude.

Of course work still needs to be done on the stability of the platform itself which continues to have challenges.

What actually motivated me to post this was that I bought TE specifically to work with ZWave Commander. I then discovered that I couldn't control the scenes created in TE via ZWave Commander. I contacted ZWave Commander's author and was told that it was because the TE Database is encrypted and that there is no API to access scene information; furthermore, the folks at ControlThink said they would not provide read only access to the database, nor were they interested in taking the ZWave Controller iPhone code which the author had offered to donate to them. For the above reasons, I felt motivated to post to the forum in the hopes that ControlThink would rethink this. Having spent many years developing software, I have come to learn that having an open platform that people can develop against provides an order of magnitude advantage. As you rightly mention, the smartphone market is currently exploding and I would think it would behoove ControlThink to spend a few cycles providing the APIs to allow third party authors to develop apps for these platforms.

From my perspective you're preaching to the choir. Two quick comments:

1. At the moment the most important question being asked is: "Is there an app for that." Being able to answer affirmitively is definitely the correct answer.
2. The advanteges of open platform model you mentionis clearly demonstrated by the Slimdevices model used in the Squeeze Center product whichis simply superb.

Fingers crossed.

Maybe I'm missing something but you can control TE scenes from zwave commander. Once you setup your network using TE right click on any of your scenes and select properties. You'll see the scene number (ie 1, 2, 3 ..). Then setup the scene on the commander server using the scene screen by just naming the scene and selecting the scene number. In other words Scene "1" in TE will be the same as scene "1" on commander so you only have to make the scene once.

The way it works (as far as I can see) is that you can control scenes that are stored in scene enabled devices; however, you can create scenes in TE that control non-scene enabled devices. For example, I can set up a scene that dims the lights in the living room, turns on the lights in my garden, and turns on the lights on the front porch. The front porch switch may be scene enabled, but the garden lights and living room switches are not. In this case, the parameters for the scene is stored in the TE database and are not available to ZWave commander. If Zwave commander executed the scene only the front porch would respond as it stores its scene data. What I understand that the ZWave Commander developer is asking is that an API be provided to allow him to read the scene information in the TE database so that he can get to the scene data and then send the appropriate commands to the relevant modules. I can't say that I know the ZWave protocol or TE apis, but I cant imagine that this would be too hard to do. Why don't the ControlThink folks network enable TE and provide a REST/Webservices API to the product. That way it would be easy to develop apps against TE without having to write a Windows server (like ZWave Commander had to) as well as still have TE running at the same time. This would allow 3rd parties to develop apps for the iPhone/iTouch/Pre/Blackberry/Nokia phones and any many others. I believe the author of ZWave Commander has offered to donate the code to ControlThink, maybe they should look into taking him up on it

You are correct it will only work with scene capable device like Leviton's Vizia RF+

 Good stuff guys.   And yes that is exactly the problem as listed by zwaveguy.  From the Controlthink SDK I can only execute scenes on devices that store scenes.  TE has a wonderful UI and mechanism for creating scenes with "non-scene capable" devices like Intermatic swtiches.   Plus TE has the whole timing aspect of timed events and Sunrise and Sunset.  ADD in the fact that two application like TE and Zwave Commander can't access the ThinkStick at the same time is all perfect reasons why i was hoping TE would incorporate my Zwave Commander Server code right into the TE product. 

So how about it ControlThink? You guys want to step up to the plate? (Or at least jump into the discussion)

Bump

Thanks for the bump. I must admit I'm very surprised that no one from ControlThink has elected to even comment on the discussion. Perhaps they don't monitor the forums which would be a tremendous shame. Especially since they have a product with such great potential - if only they'd open it up a little more they would have something that much better.

 Not to mention in the last two months I have added two more vendors that have added support for Zwave Commander to their products...

Homeplanner  http://www.hometomation.com/homeplanner/

JB LightManager-Pro http://cms.jbmedia.de/

 I would love for ThinkEssentials to be added to that list!

 

I'm guessing everyone is on PTO for this week but I'll ad my vote to having this type of functionality. Opening up the system would be wonderful and significantly increase the potential power of TE (just check out iPeng and SqueezeCenter).

My guess is that any type of functionality that doesn't increase the integration between ControlThink and other Leviton products will likely be a low priority.  SJ

SJHT:

My guess is that any type of functionality that doesn't increase the integration between ControlThink and other Leviton products will likely be a low priority.  SJ

 

Well, you touch on somethign intersting... a feature roadmap would be greatly appreciated.