Comments on: Shion 2 Plans

By: Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:36:34 +0000

Plans sound fantastic – best of luck with them!!

By: Scott Newman

Scott Newman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:17:38 +0000

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!

By: cjkarr

cjkarr — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:36:17 +0000

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.

By: Scott Newman

Scott Newman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:17:23 +0000

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