What is Homegate?

[Tonyo]

Hi, I am new to these forums. I have a c-bus system with Minder software that was installed about 3 years ago. I do my own programming of the minder system but I am not a hardware/electrical person. Is Homegate a replacement or upgrade for Minder. From the brief information I have found, it appears it will let you control the c-bus from anywhere on your network which Minder will not. Can you point me to more information please.

[Wilko]

I've attached the HomeGate brochure in PDF for you. HomeGate is one of several C-Bus related software packages, I'll leave it to their marketing guys to explain what each one does!

Have a look at www.clipsal.com/cis , all the brochures are there.

Cheers

[Tonyo]

Thanks Peter,
I had read that stuff before. How does it differ from "minder". Can you integrate your own software to it. You can't with "minder"

[Darren]

Thanks Peter,
I had read that stuff before. How does it differ from "minder". Can you integrate your own software to it. You can't with "minder"

HomeGate and Minder are so fundamentally different that it is hard to know where to begin. I think that the HomeGate brochure describes the product quite well. Do you have specific questions about HomeGate ?

You can use HomeGate to launch other software packages. What do you mean by "integrate your own software" ?

[Tonyo]

Darren,
what I would like to do is send information to the c-bus system, such as dim lights from a VB or C++ program I have written. I can't do this thru Minder. It will launch programs but not accept commands from one. I would also like to do this from a program running on any of my networked PC's.
Tony

[Alex]

Tonyo, I think what you need is C-Gate. It has a Tcp server that allows you to send C-Bus commands to C-Bus groups via Tcp.

E.g. if you want to dim a lamp, you would first create a Tcp client connection in your own application to the server/port socket configured in C-Gate, then send something like "ramp 1/56/20 150 0" to ramp the level of group 1/56/20 to 150 over 0 seconds.

Tip for anyone doing this in Windows: I found that I had to send an "exit" command from the client to the C-Gate server to close each session. Just simply dropping a connection often seems to leave sockets in CLOSE_WAIT forever on the server side, which is Not Good if you create a lot of sessions ...

[Tonyo]

Thanks Alex,
Do you know if you can have c-gate and minder both running? Also what is the cost of c-gate?
Tony

[Darren]

There is no reason why Minder and C-Gate can't both be used on one installation.

You can get C-Gate for free from http://www.clipsal.com/cis/downloads.php3#CGate :)

[Tonyo]

Thanks Darren,
I will load it down and give it a go
Tony :D