RCoe
Apr 06, 2010, 11:12 PM
My wife and I just bought a ten year old vacation home which was built from the ground up around the Smarthome concept. Most of the controllers were built in during the construction process. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what this meant since we did our evaluating during the day over the course of several days. We barely had to turn on any lights, and most of the ones we did turn on were of the on/off variety.
When we spent our first night there you can imagine what we went through trying to figure out what these unusual light switches were doing whenever we pressed them. Press one switch and lights in several rooms went on, press another and the lights in the room you're in go on at 50%. Press another and they all go off. What the .....? This Smarthome has no instruction manual!
After finding an old laptop hooked up to an uninterruptible power supply in the "control room" with several cords plugged into unlabeled wall plugs I discovered a program loaded at startup called HCA, version 5.2. Since then (several visits ago) I have been trying to understand what it does. Since the laptop is basically in a utility closet, I couldn't tell if the various lighting commands were even working (using the test feature) since I wasn't in the room being tested. My wife helped by walking around and yelling whether or not lights were coming on, then off. I have finally installed a VPN type program that allows me to take over the old laptop with another laptop, and now I can walk around issuing commands and see the results myself (my wife is happier now).
Just last week I finally figured out how to turn on groups of lights (by right-clicking and selecting "on"), and I think I have deciphered the already created programs and schedules. I have run a few of the programs and observed them working as scheduled. Very exciting - like figuring out an alien technology.
So, finally my question:
If I upgrade this 5.2 version to 9 will it convert and/or run the existing programs and schedules? The programs and scenes are so well set up that I would like to be able to continue using them, and add new ones. I don't really want to start from scratch - I'm afraid the house would be dark and cold for awhile.
When we spent our first night there you can imagine what we went through trying to figure out what these unusual light switches were doing whenever we pressed them. Press one switch and lights in several rooms went on, press another and the lights in the room you're in go on at 50%. Press another and they all go off. What the .....? This Smarthome has no instruction manual!
After finding an old laptop hooked up to an uninterruptible power supply in the "control room" with several cords plugged into unlabeled wall plugs I discovered a program loaded at startup called HCA, version 5.2. Since then (several visits ago) I have been trying to understand what it does. Since the laptop is basically in a utility closet, I couldn't tell if the various lighting commands were even working (using the test feature) since I wasn't in the room being tested. My wife helped by walking around and yelling whether or not lights were coming on, then off. I have finally installed a VPN type program that allows me to take over the old laptop with another laptop, and now I can walk around issuing commands and see the results myself (my wife is happier now).
Just last week I finally figured out how to turn on groups of lights (by right-clicking and selecting "on"), and I think I have deciphered the already created programs and schedules. I have run a few of the programs and observed them working as scheduled. Very exciting - like figuring out an alien technology.
So, finally my question:
If I upgrade this 5.2 version to 9 will it convert and/or run the existing programs and schedules? The programs and scenes are so well set up that I would like to be able to continue using them, and add new ones. I don't really want to start from scratch - I'm afraid the house would be dark and cold for awhile.