Performance of Indigo and possible use for "dancing&quo

I missed this holiday season, however by next season I would like to setup my outside LED lights to "dance".. I have poked around at some of the programs to use INSTEON to control the lights (yes this means quite a few Lamp/Appliance modules).. However I am not that impressed, and the one that I am, am not willing to spend that money..

So I am looking at writing my own app... However, right now I don't want to get into the communications piece to my INSTEON controller, so I was hoping with Indigo having a web interface (easy to program), how responsive is the web server?

It seems to do dancing lights and from what little I have read, the controller can handle commands down to about 5ms apart.. Can the Indigo web server handle calls that fast?

I know this is NOT one of those primary things for Indigo, but would love to jump ahead to writing the program to script out my "dance" and take the simple approach of calling a webserver to execute the commands.

Hopefully this makes sense... Thoughts?

[jay (support)]

I missed this holiday season, however by next season I would like to setup my outside LED lights to "dance".. I have poked around at some of the programs to use INSTEON to control the lights (yes this means quite a few Lamp/Appliance modules).. However I am not that impressed, and the one that I am, am not willing to spend that money..

So I am looking at writing my own app... However, right now I don't want to get into the communications piece to my INSTEON controller, so I was hoping with Indigo having a web interface (easy to program), how responsive is the web server?

It seems to do dancing lights and from what little I have read, the controller can handle commands down to about 5ms apart.. Can the Indigo web server handle calls that fast?

I know this is NOT one of those primary things for Indigo, but would love to jump ahead to writing the program to script out my "dance" and take the simple approach of calling a webserver to execute the commands.

Hopefully this makes sense... Thoughts?

Well, it's cherrypy, the python web server, so it's lightweight but interpreted. There's really not much delay from the time the web server receives a command to the time it gets to the PowerLinc, but if you're talking 5-10ms desired latency then you might be out of luck.

Having said that, I'm quite dubious that INSTEON is gonna be reliable trying to send signals out 5ms or even 10ms apart - that's gonna cause a LOT of traffic on the power line with LOTS of collisions. I don't believe 5ms takes into account the acknowledgment - so it'd be like 0 hops and no ACK and no retries you might get 5ms. I really don't think you're gonna get that type of performance out of INSTEON.

But, try it, it shouldn't take a lot of effort to do a proof-of-concept - I could be totally wrong and it certainly would be really cool!

I missed this holiday season, however by next season I would like to setup my outside LED lights to "dance".. I have poked around at some of the programs to use INSTEON to control the lights (yes this means quite a few Lamp/Appliance modules).. However I am not that impressed, and the one that I am, am not willing to spend that money..

So I am looking at writing my own app... However, right now I don't want to get into the communications piece to my INSTEON controller, so I was hoping with Indigo having a web interface (easy to program), how responsive is the web server?

It seems to do dancing lights and from what little I have read, the controller can handle commands down to about 5ms apart.. Can the Indigo web server handle calls that fast?

I know this is NOT one of those primary things for Indigo, but would love to jump ahead to writing the program to script out my "dance" and take the simple approach of calling a webserver to execute the commands.

Hopefully this makes sense... Thoughts?

Well, it's cherrypy, the python web server, so it's lightweight but interpreted. There's really not much delay from the time the web server receives a command to the time it gets to the PowerLinc, but if you're talking 5-10ms desired latency then you might be out of luck.

Having said that, I'm quite dubious that INSTEON is gonna be reliable trying to send signals out 5ms or even 10ms apart - that's gonna cause a LOT of traffic on the power line with LOTS of collisions. I don't believe 5ms takes into account the acknowledgment - so it'd be like 0 hops and no ACK and no retries you might get 5ms. I really don't think you're gonna get that type of performance out of INSTEON.

But, try it, it shouldn't take a lot of effort to do a proof-of-concept - I could be totally wrong and it certainly would be really cool!

Yes, when I read somewhere else that it could respond every 5ms I was sceptical.. To be honest, I think at 100ms would be more then enough for most things... The big challenge is trying to "group" lights in a way to have multiple lights coming on together..
But I will be trying it out, probably after the holiday's and will let everyone know any results..
Thanks for the information!

Have you checked out this guys stuff:

http://www.lights-alive.com/products.html

Not sure exactly what your going for, but it maybe simpler and more economical to go with something purpose built.

(bought some LED lights from him once, good guy)

-Chris

Jay's thought that Insteon isn't up to the task of choregraphing holiday lights is spot-on.

Insteon / X10 use in holiday lighting is generally restricted to switching long-running slow-starting items. Examples I can think of are fog & snow machines and compressors for those inflatable lawn decorations (they are not instant-on, nor are they instant-off so having sub-second control of them is not important), or simple signage ("show starting in 5 minutes", "tune to channel 97.7", etc).

You need an actual "lighting controller" if you want to do any kind of choreography. There are many companies that make them in a wide variety of designs & prices. One popular company is http://lightorama.com, I have 48 channels worth myself. They can sync down to 1/100 of a second, though I never bother with any timing smaller than a full second.

additions:
1) these things are also designed to be used outdoors, unlike the majority of x10/insteon devices.
2) 48 channels of water proof insteon appliancelincs is $2200. And that is just for low-speed on/off, you don't get diming or high-speed sync with them. You could get over twice as many channels if you went with the real solution!

Hi everyone,

I'd like to bump this thread up to see if anyone has come up with some other mac based solutions for either indoor or outdoor holiday light shows. I've looked at the Light-o-rama equipment and software, but I'd prefer not to run my mac in windoz mode. I'm looking to automate my holiday indoor lionel train layout (Disneyland in my basement!) using a music-driven light show with probably 20-30 channels of control.

Cheers,
Don W.
Barrington IL

The minimum back to back timing you will get with Insteon is on the order of 250 ms.

What you need is a serial connection to a purpose-built controller with lots of TRIAC outputs. I found this DIY project: http://computerchristmas.com/christmas/ ... LowLimit-0

I don't see a download link for his PCB layout but it looks like he is using ExpressPCB which is a very easy way to get boards made.