buying advice needed. choosing between tellstick duo and net

[ltamas]

Hi!

I am considering two options for automating some electrical components in our appartment. please help me with deciding which of the above would be a better solution,
1.) Raspberry PI with Tellstick duo
2.) standalone Tellstick net

I might need to send raw commands to manage some devices that are not officially supported. is it possible with the tellstick net?
I'd like to have this as the command center of my home automation project. Are there any limitation to the Tellstick net? Is there anything I might need the Raspberry Pi for? (Things like Siri proxy integration comes to my mind) is there anything else?


any help is greatly appreciated. I am fairly good at linux and hardware hacking, but if possible I'd like to go the simpler route.

thanks
tamas

[jkp]

I've got a Raspberry PI and was considering the same thing.

I ended up choosing Tellstick Duo, primarily as I got the impression tellstick net couldn't be used stand-alone (but only via the Telldus Live service). Also Duo seemed simpler (less possible problems) and looked a bit smaller and cost a bit less.

Apparently things are changing so that the Net can be used without Live in the future, there's some firmware (though IIRC not production status yet) for that.

If I understand correctly, the Net currently might have a bit better support for custom firmware (bricking safety), but this might be incorrect.

I'd say Raspberry PI & Duo might be the better choice of the two you present, primarily because it gives more versatility - the full GNU/Linux capabilities give you possibility to do much more on the server than the PIC environment of the Tellstick Net. If you are willing to hack and if you consider the standalone Net firmware ready enough (or want to use the Live service), then PI & Net might be a good choice too, or just the Net depending on how complicated controlling you want to do at the "server" / command center.

[ltamas]

thanks. that's pretty useful. When you say use the net together with the duo, how would that be done? my understanding from reading the site that the net can't do anything on the local network. How would it be possible to connect the net and the pi?

[jkp]

thanks. that's pretty useful. When you say use the net together with the duo, how would that be done? my understanding from reading the site that the net can't do anything on the local network. How would it be possible to connect the net and the pi?

There's an alternative under-development firmware for the Net to enable local access. Not quite sure of the status of it, but one thread about it can be read at http://developer.telldus.se/blog/2012/0 ... n-firmware and a ticket is at http://developer.telldus.com/ticket/114

Edit:

(and for other readers, you probably meant to say use the net together with the (raspberry) pi as I read it the first time, not the net together with the duo as it's written)

By the way, I haven't actually used the Duo with the pi yet, and haven't put it into much real use - so far, just some tests with power control & weather sensors on Linux and some flashing & tests on Windows. But I think others have reported success with the Pi. One thing which might be good to be aware of with the pi, is that the word is out that at least the first pi version (256M of memory) may have some trouble with the stability of the USB port(s), depending on device connected, power source and possibly the phase of the moon; I've had some of these troubles also, with bluetooth/wlan adapters, so I decided I'll use the Duo only later on pi, or perhaps use it on another Linux server. Apparently the new version with 512M is more robust.

[jkp]

One plus point for the Net would be that if there's good enough firmware for local access, there may be some more freedom in placing the device so it'll have good radio coverage. Depending of course on one's network wiring, server location, device locations etc. Would also offer more fault tolerance, even if the main control center/server is out for some reason, another one could take over. I think however I read somewhere that there may be limitations to using local access together with live.

[ltamas]

thanks for the long answer. really informative.
one last question. is there any way to send send raw commands on the net?

[jkp]

thanks for the long answer. really informative.
one last question. is there any way to send send raw commands on the net?

I don't know about that, but I would assume that yes at least when the firmware is ready.