Virtual Comfort

[Tas]

Hi all,

Firstly thanks to the comfort community. Without your help I would not love the product as much as I do.

I\'ve been wanting to develop some of my own integration programming software for a while but part of the problem for me is having access to the all the hardward for testing as using my own system is very inconvenient.

I\'d like to develop a vitual comfort by developing a simulator for the underlying hardware. Ideally I\'d like the simulator to accept real firmware, vocab and UCM firmware and allow you to connect to it using Comfigurator, Wizcomfort of any other UCM client. My vision is to have a user interface which lets you construct a virtual system and then instantiate it.

It may sound complicated and I guess it\'s not easy but I\'m a professional software engineer so the software development part is easy for me. What I need help with is details of the hardware. I imagine I\'d have to simulate a processor of some kind which executes the firmware but what processor is it and what instruction set does it have?

This sort of software would have many uses such as debugging configurations, training, testing new features, testing firmware and testing integrations.

If anyone out there has the neccesary knowledge and would like to help then please let me know. In return I will be making the product available for free to everyone.


Thanks,

Tas
 

[Ingo]

Hi Tas,

If you get something like this going then I am interested as well. I am currently assisting Julian with testing on the ComfortClient and having to test on a real system sometimes upsets the neighbours, especially if something goes wrong and the alarm sounds in the middle of the night.

I do however have a seperate test system but that is not nearly as populated as my production system.

I guess the challenge would be to integrate different UCM/s into your software emulator - there are so many of them.

Regards,

Ingo

[Tas]

Hi Ingo,

Thanks for your interest. Yes, the UCMs could get interesting if you want to simulate the whole system with thrid party UCMs. For now I\'m thinking simulate a UCM5. I have a RAKO lighting system which uses RS232 and I\'ve already started simulating that so in theory I should be able to simulate that portion of the system. At this early stage though I think trying to simulate comfort will be enough of a challenge.

Tas

[slychiu]

That is very interesting and useful, although it seems really challenging
We would be happy to provide information and assistance

[Tas]

Hi Slychiu,

Thanks for your interest and support. I think the most challenging part will be emulating the controllers (the parts of comfort that have firmware) and ensureing that sychronisation is identical to the hardware. The RS484 bus and physical devices should be straight forward.

Rather than try to specify the product completely I beleive the best way to develop this is incrementally, working on the parts with the most \'unknowns\' first. For me the first is the comfort controller, the part that understands and executes action codes. Once we have a prototype of this we can attempt a UCM which should turn it into something that we can connect to and test. This should be our first milestone.

So the first questions I have are:

1. What is the controller chip which comfort uses and what is it\'s instruction set.

2. How is firmware developed? Is compiled from a high level language like C.

Thanks,

Tas

 

[blowoutbedding]

That\'s a great idea to invent a virtual comfort. it will be a great combination of programming and firmware .

[ident]

Yes, that is a great idea. I dont know if Tas is still working on that