Chris J. Karr, December 4th, 2008
As the previous post indicates, Audacious Software is now something more than a checking account to accept donations and Amazon referral income. Given my impending independence, I wanted to share some plans for the Shion application.
Sometime during the next month, I hope to release Shion 2. This will be an architectural reworking of Shion that splits out the user interface from the home automation control. One of the challenges I continually face with Shion is that I receive many requests to support new hardware with the application. However, since I’m giving it away, Shion doesn’t generate the resources needed to purchase the necessary hardware. Consequently, as of version 2, Shion will become a paid commercial application. The funds from sales of the Shion software will help me support the growing number of Insteon devices in addition to other platforms such as X10 and ZigBee.
I’m planning on continuing to contribute to the open-source community, so I will also be releasing a GPL’ed Cocoa framework (name to be determined) that allows developers to build new open-source applications to control their environments. The paid Shion application will essentially become a user interface for this framework. As I add support for new devices in Shion, this functionality will become available in the GPL’ed framework. By supporting the paid application, you’ll be helping me expand the hardware support in the free framework.
(The current version [1.x] of Shion will remain free and open source. I don’t have any plans to remove the code, but I also won’t be contributing to its further development from this point forward.)
December 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Any plans for what the price point will be? If it’s in the $25-40 range, I’m happy to contribute to help you keep this awesome project viable. I use Shion 1.x every day to automate my lights, and it’s also helping keep my house sparkly with Xmas lights right now!
Some features I’d love to see:
* Some kind of interface to control shion through a web interface (Sockets, web service, etc.) Smarthome released a HouseLinc that had a web server in it, but it wasn’t extensible, so I returned it
* Ability to control my sprinklers and low-voltage lighting. (Insteon)
* Ability to control my HVAC (Insteon)
* X10 support for legacy modules I have lying around
If all those features were in there, I’d pay up to $99 for it.
If you’d like some help with the open-source Cocoa framework, please count me in! I’d enjoy working on the documentation and/or the website.
– Scott
December 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I don’t know what the price point will be quite yet, but it will be under $40.
As for your other comments:
1. I have an internal build of a web interface up and running. I just haven’t released any of the code yet. (It’s quite primitive.)
2. Sprinklers and low voltage lighting are on the to-do list. My current priority list looks something like this:
a. Thermostats
b. Legacy X10 devices
c. Insteon motion and door sensors
d. Other devices (such as your sprinklers)
With any luck, I’ll have some of the new code that does X10 and thermostats released in the coming weeks.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
That’s great news! Having a web interface would allow for cool things like:
* Dashboard widget control
* Mobile interface via web
* Widgets on other locally networked computers
* Flash/Flex apps
* Cron scheduling via CURL (this is the biggie for me!)
CURL support is great for me, because I have a local calendar in iCal to control the devices (as in your docs) but MobileMe is propagating it across all my Sync’d devices. I had to put in dummy scripts on my laptop that it could run every day so I didn’t get errors.
Great stuff!
December 6th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Plans sound fantastic – best of luck with them!!
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