How Does It Work?

This is a broad subject, covered in more detail in our tutorials, so we'll just cover the basics here. The basic steps that you take to configure a CQC system go something like this:

• Installation. You can install CQC on multiple computers (wired or wireless) in the home. There will be one 'master server', that acts as the central storage point for your system and the 'social club' where everyone comes to meet and greet. Other machines can serve other purposes such as running graphical displays that the family members can use to interact with the home.
• Device Drivers. The way that CQC can talk to various types of devices is through small bits of software called device drivers. So, for each of the devices you want to control, you will tell CQC to load up the appropriate device driver. Each of them will have a name, called a moniker. Each device driver will provide one or more named 'fields' that represent some aspect of the device, such as Volume or Mute or OutputZone and so forth. The combination of a moniker and a field name uniquely represents some aspect of some specific device in the home that can be seen or changed, or both.
• Create Interfaces. The most common means of user interaction with the devices under CQC's control are graphical interfaces, often run on wall mounted or hand held touch screen devices, but they can also be used from standard PCs or on the big screen in the home theater. The creation of these interfaces is the major portion of the job of configuring CQC to do what you want it to do. We provide a powerful user interface design tool that allows you to do this in a completely point and click way, no coding skills required. The general goal of such interfaces is to create 'activity oriented' interfaces. I.e. the goal is not to just put an emulation of each device's remote control on the screen, but to coordinate multiple devices to achieve some goal, such as "Watch Movies" or "Secure Home" or "Browse CDs" and so forth.
• Schedule Events. Though it is not a necessary aspect of all solutions, most users will want to schedule activities, such as running the sprinklers every X number of days, turning on the front porch light 30 minutes before sundown and turning it off 30 minutes before sunrise, and so forth. You can easily set up such scheduled events, as they are called in CQC speak.
• Triggered Events. Triggered events are another optional, but powerful feature of CQC. You can configure CQC to react to changes in devices, which in turn causes changes in other devices. For instance, if the window sensor indicates that a window changes from closed to open, even if the security system isn't armed, turn on the lights in that room. Or if the DVD player drawer goes from open to closed, see if a disc is in the player and if so turn on the system for viewing DVDs. There are many possibilities here, limited only by your imagination for the most part.
• Other User Interfaces. You may also wish to configure other types of user interfaces, such as a remote control, to allow the user to ask CQC to do something in response to a press of a button on an IR remote, or an RF remote. It is sometimes convenient to be able to invoke certain operations without having to go to a touch screen or computer.

It is important to note that, in all of the cases where you are configuring CQC to invoke automation logic, that that logic is created in exactly the same way, using the same interface. All that changes is whether you invoke it via an IR remote, via a button on a touch screen, schedule it to be invoked at a given time, and so forth. So once you understand the core issues of creating automation logic, which is a purely point and click affair as well unless you want to get really advanced, everything else is mostly just a matter of how you invoke that logic that you've created.

Any device in the home that can be controlled in some way will have some sort of communications port that allows CQC to interact with it. Even the simplest controllable devices generally at least allow for control via infrared remotes, and a system like CQC can learn and replay IR remote commands as well. You should be able to bring any such device under the control of CQC with the appropriate device driver or IR codes.

The bulk of automation logic creation comes down to writing a value to a particular field, e.g. write the value 30 to the field 'HTDVD.Volume', which is the Volume field for a device with the moniker HTDVD (probably the DVD player in the home theater), or getting the values of fields and reacting to them in some way, e.g. if the temperature is above 80 and it is between the hours of 5 and 7, close the blinds in the living room.