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Home Automation FAQ : HA Equipment : Creative Control Concepts/HCS-II : Open Source Projects : Why isn the HCS-II firmware open source?

April 26, 2017automation concepts CONTROL creative equipment Ha hcs-ii Home open source Projects

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Home Automation FAQ : HA Equipment : Creative Control Concepts/HCS-II : Open Source Projects : Why isn the HCS-II firmware open source?

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We thought about this long and hard. We decided to keep the firmware closed to ensure the stability of the controllers. The firwmare is > 200 pages of assembler and while it is commetned, there is no documentation on the architecture of the firmware. This would make development difficult. You may sneer and say we did this to protect our revenue from sales of XPRESS upgrades. Not true. We get very little $$$ from XPRESS upgrades since most people already have v3.5 or higher and have gotten their upgrades (which are only bug fixes) for free. We feared that if the firmware was opened up, we’d face a support nightmare where user X downloaded firmware variant Y and is having trouble. If you add in Compiler or HOST variant Z it would be a mess. Keeping the firmware under wraps allows us to ensure the controller boards are stable. We may at some point start offering the EPROM hex files as free downloads allowing folks with EPROM programmers to upgrade their own chips. Besides, the HCS-III is