Hi Guys, I am new to VelBus but from what i have seen so far, it looks like it will do what i want.
My last attempt at home automation was with X10, which despite spending 1000’s of hours working on a program for it, and getting several people around the world to test it…just could not do what I wanted…to unreliable
This I have high hopes for… … so to the reason for my post… as anyone here done any programming through the USB interface using VB2008 ?
Would be interested to hear of any pitfalls or issues that may trip me up, or even some samples to give me some ideas.
One question, can the system be operated by PC through the interface and the VelBus controller, (as back up).
I did some quick tests with VB2008 (C#). Have a look at forum.velleman.be/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1193 for more details.
However, I’m not familar with VB/C#. Because I’m an Actionscript (Flex,Flash) programmar myselve I switched to Flex. Running the VelbusLink as a server (socket) it’s possible to communicate with Velbus using any language that supports socket communication.
I’m using my velbus modules for 9 months now, so in the meantime I have some experience with the Velbus API (see forum.velleman.be/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1710) and I must say it works very stable. It’s like night and day compared with X10
My home-made tool runs 24 hrs a day for several months now and I don’t think the velbus communication ever went down. Except because of some errors in my own code.
The nice thing about Velbus is its 2-way communication which makes it very suitable to create an event driven application.
Some disadvantages: Because it’s still a new product it still has a very small community. This is the only forum I know about and it is not very active (yet?) … I hope more programmers will join soon so we can share and learn from each other
The Velleman support tries to help where they can (thumbs up guys ) but it’s clear that they don’t have the time/possibilities to spend a lot of time giving a lot of detailled support on every single question.
I also hope that Velleman keeps on developing new modules and shares some new code and new insights about the Velbus product line … Velleman, any updates on this?
I am waiting on the first delivery of components for the new installation, and can’t wait to get programming. The X10 program i wrote was a big one, that was designed to do everything in the house and even look for fire, flood and intruder… as well as all the other bits.
Was going to make it freely available over the internet too, with upgrades… but just found X10 is too lightweight for my needs and was just not stable enough. Drove me mad for several months, then i just dumped it all…
I have high hopes for VelBus…
do you know if anyone is programming in Visual Basic, not really in to C+ yet.
I hope that as we the users develop more code and applications, then Velleman will develop the modules further.
… so to the reason for my post… as anyone here done any programming through the USB interface using VB2008 ?