IS the ADI/Leopard all that good ?

[aboyce]

I find the ADI stuff to be rather low in stability. It is very finiky and will stop working at the slightest of problems. It is very complex to program the screen layout and get a simple layout that could be done in seconds with a standard PC. The price is good but I guess you get what you pay for.

What is your thoughts.

PS I can provide much details and examples to back up my findings and justify this post if you want I would be glad to add to this post with these issues.

AB

[stevea]

Andrew,
I can't speak about the Leopard as I've never had one. However, I don't think it's fair to broad-brush ADI products as being prone to such problems. I've had an Ocelot and a SECU16 for several years now and have to say there is nothing more rock-solid in my entire automation set up. There are lots of posts here from people like me who are amazed at how stable they are.

Maybe you've got a bad Leopard? ADI is also pretty good about helping people with issues, so might even be willing to give you a loaner to see if the problem goes away.

Steve

[Rupp]

I agree with Steve on this one. My Ocelot is so solid that I do not have a clue how I set it up over a year ago. I programmed it with some codes that Jon Armstrong (Thanks again Jon) gave me and it has worked perfectly ever since.

[aboyce]

I wish i had paid less and got an OCELOT.

[JimCirillo]

I'll also agree that the Applied digital stuff I'm using is rock solid - I have 2 leopards, an ocelot, a SECU-IR, a SECU16, and 4 temp sensors running. I haven't even upgraded to CMAX 2 yet since I haven't really had the need to change anything!

Andrew, I remember a problem someone else had a while back that was similar to yours - it turned out to be an intermittent connection in the 4-wire bus.
As for programming the leopard screens, I'd say it was tedious, but not complex at all.

[Brian Raynor]

I have an Ocelot (as master) and Leopard II (as slave) as well as two SECU16s.

I'd say they are rock-solid. The Leopard II is basically an Ocelot with a touch screen, so no difference with reliability here.

I did have a problem a while back with communication on the ADNET bus. Had my Ocelot and 2 SECU16s located right next to one another, but the Leopard II was about 75 foot away (all connected via CAT5). I had a problem where if the Leopard was turned on and connected to the bus, that the Ocelot had problems communicating with the SECU16s or the Leopard.

Probably was easily solved (thanks to a suggestion from Guy) by putting a 150 ohm resistor across the COMA/B terminals on the Leopard II. Was just needed for additional termination in my setup. Now my communications are 100% reliable, and fast...

Regarding difficult to program the Leopard screens, I'll agree with you on that if you are not familiar with ladder logic, and if you are using CMAX itself to design the screens... An alternative is to use Jim Beersman's Touch Screen Editor (TSE), designed specifically for the Leopard.

TSE is MUCH nicer than CMAX for laying out the Leopard screens and provides all sorts of options, including the ability to resize buttons to any size (on a per pixel basis), place them anywhere, shows icons on top of buttons so you can visually see how things look before downloading to the Leopard, etc). its well worth the $15 he charges for registration. You can get it at

http://www.geocities.com/jb_sgf/

There are definately limitations with what you can do on a Leopard (ie: button presses are detected only in a 10x6 grid, etc), but it is very powerful, reliable, etc nonetheless. Once you get used to the ladder logic programming, its fairly straightforward...

[aboyce]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jim Cirillo:
Andrew, I remember a problem someone else had a while back that was similar to yours - it turned out to be an intermittent connection in the 4-wire bus.
. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

4-Wire bus. That must be my problem I only have two wires plus power on my bus?

[Gene Vance]

I would be interested to hear what a four wire bus has to do with the ADInet as well.

[The Gemini]

I agree with everyone else. My Ocelot has been running reliably for about a year now with no problems.

[aboyce]

I know you get what you pay for but the Leopard II is just not all that cool. It is like using DOS Ver 1 on a PC XT in a Windows XP Pentium world.
The screen flickers if there is to much White displayed. So I use Bitmaps with Black backgrounds and very little White.

The touch buttons are flacky somtimes they dont work somtimes they work and somtimes they work but they are slow.

Cannot just write text to the screen from a CMAX program ie "Sprinkler is ON" "Sprinkler is Off" I use Homeseer for that but somtimes it messes up and erases the screen and I have to restart the Leopard. I know you can use ASCII code to represent the Letters in a Veriable but who wants to do that.

I am using Bitmaps with Words to change screen information but this seems like a little assbakwords. The entire devise seems like somthing like a hobby kit then a stable home automation solution. I like to tinker and somtimes it is cool to play with the leopard but I will definatly be replacing it with a Touch screen device that uses a modern operating system like Windows or Lenix. Way more high tech looking and much easer to program and get status feedback.

Again I will probably use my leopard as an Ocelot and just put it under the stairs with the rest of the wireing stuff.

Andrew

[JimCirillo]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gene27:
I would be interested to hear what a four wire bus has to do with the ADInet as well. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Sorry - 4 wire is my shorthand for the 2 comms lines and 2 (+/ground) power lines.

[Rick Tinker]

If you are running modules all over, you really should do 6 wires as well and make the bus look like a bus rather than a star configuration. In other words, you would have 2 wires for comms in, and two wires for comms out, and then 2 more wires for power. If you only have 4 wires but have an outlet nearby, then it is perhaps better to use the 4 wires for comms and get power from a local transformer.

[aboyce]

OK this is my main point....

Everyone would seem to think when looking to start home automation or doing it for years that to rely on a pc is a bad thing. Well at first it would seem logical but that is only if you look at the stability of your work or home pc that runs your games programs and spend time on the web downloading clickware and junk. It is a very unstable beast and you would think that this is a state of things PC. Well if you have a PC that you run just your home automation stuff on and HomeSeer as I do you will find that it is by far the best and most stable solution around Homeseer and My Server have never given me a lick of problems only the issues connecting to devices such as the leopard. The thinking is the Leopard/Ocelot will continue to run when the PC is down well it is my PC that lets me know when the Leopard is down. The Hart beat software people are using to monitor there PC's from an Ocelot is an indication to me that things are backwords or you need a new PC or newer Windows OS such as XP or Server 2003 good quality servers are cheep these days and you just cannot get anything more stable or flexable then Homeseer,Windows 2003 Server and a good HP/Dell server. See the HP DL140 server under $1,000 for a top of the line device.

[GregKing]

Andrew -

While I agree that a system purely dedicated to HA functions and not doing other tasks does greatly improve the stability of a WinOS system, it can still have issues.

Or (gasp) we might even have a problem with HS! This is even more likely given that most of us run in Beta modes and may use various 3rd party plugins that are still in test.

Given this, I run the Ocelot watchdog whenever I'm out of the country for several weeks at a time and I want my system to keep going.

The watchdog rarely kicks in, but it works perfectly whenever my HS PC gets tired.

gk

[Brian Raynor]

One thing about using a dedicated non-PC controller for Home Automation (like the Leopard II, Ocelot, HAI, etc) is that when the power goes out, it can run for DAYS or WEEKS off a cheap $40 UPS...

During an ice storm a few months ago, power was out for 3 days. However, my Ocelot and Leopard ran off the UPS during that time and functioned perfectly. So did my HAI OP II (running off its internal battery). Can't that easily, and definitely cheaply, with a PC, even a laptop.

So, you ask even if these systems are running, what good are they during a power outage (ie: no X10, etc)?... First off my HAI security system still worked so the house was totally secure. Since our phone lines were up, I coud still use the phone interface of the HAI as well (access security, temperature, etc).

In addition, I am using my Ocelot and SECU16 to control a gas fireplace in the den. Using the Leopard, I can set desired temperature in the den and the Ocelot kept it nice and cozy. Also from the phone (since I have the HAI interfaced directly into the Leopard's serial port), I can use the HAI phone interface to control the fireplace so I dn't have to get up and touch the Leopard. Etc...

Of course there are other things that can be done as well. A PC would be hard pressed to run this long on a UPS.

And of course there's the case of reliability of the PC, etc. I still use HomeSeer quite extensively, but all the more "critical" functions (irrigation, heating/temp, access control, basic lighting, etc) are primarily done in one of these systems. HomeSeer can then override or supplement the functionality.