Search results

We are about to do our 5.4 release of CQC, which now includes support MQTT (as a client.) So there is now an MQTT driver and you can configure CQC to associate driver fields with specific topics, tell it how to interpret payload data, and how to convert to/from the CQC field representations of...

Charmed Quark Systems has released version 5.3 of its CQC automation platform.    The big ticket item for this version is a new, from the ground up Z-Wave driver. This is now our third Z-Wave driver, and they haven't gotten more fun to write. Our previous driver was based on the Leviton VRC0P...

Just a heads up to let you guys know that we have released 5.2 of our CQC automation platform. The primary focus of this release was non-Windows touch screen clients. Our flagship touch screen client is Windows based, but we have always had Android and iOS thin clients that work via our RIVA...

CQC, being Windows based, has a very powerful Windows based touch screen client, the Interface Viewer. It animates touch screens created in our Interface Editor tool. In order to support non-Windows clients we created our RIVA architecture. This works sort of like the X-Windows system in Unix or...

CQC is a very powerful product, and that causes a lot of folks to think that it is something that they'd never figure out. But we understand that it has a learning curve and have always had a 'quick start' scheme to help you get a fairly nice setup without any need to dig into CQC's hard core...

So we've been working on a big new feature for CQC in the voice control area. We have Echo support and that's fine and it does what it does. But, we also wanted to have another option that met the criteria:   1. Easy to set up, with lots of 'out of the box' functionality 2. Purely local, no...

Just to let everyone know, we are changing servers tomorrow. Our current server is venerable, about 10 years old at this point or so. We are moving to a shiny new one, and took the opportunity to update everything from OS to forum software.    This will require changing our DNS entries from the...

CQC 5.0 has just been released. It is a ginormous release (we checked, BTW, and scientifically it does qualify as ginormous.) It is a 'start over' in a number of different ways, in our administrative interface, in our web site, and our help system and training videos, and a number of the most...

We are coming up on our 5.0 release of CQC (www.charmedquark.com) and have begun working on some introductory videos. This is a first take on part one of that series. This one will be re-done again before it's formally posted, with all the lessons learned applied, but I wanted to post it because...

I wrote up a wee technical article for CE Pro magazine last month. I meant to post a link here but forgot about it. Some of the info in it may be of interest to folks here, though it is mostly targeting the professional installer community in some ways...

It's always easy for a company to plow ahead, dealing with the problems immediately in front of them, and not look up to figure out what other problems might be further off in the distance. Once in a while, we like to try to get some feedback on what roadblocks might exist to adoption of the...

I thought some folks might find this interesting. One of our users has implemented an interesting medical device prototype using CQC. Because the user interface design system is so powerful, he makes a good point about it being a very useful tool for rapid prototyping of products. And, in his...

San Francisco based company Cloudy Horizons unveiled today its new flagship product, Hyper-Cloud. Touted by many as a guaranteed paradigm changer, Hyper-Cloud is a product far out in front of the cloud-based services wave. Capitalized by a Who's Who of the venture capital elite, Cloudy Horizons...

Just to let folks know we have a CQC 'Step Up' sale going on this month, so buy any given tier and get the next one up. So, this would be the time if you've been waiting.

OK, so we've been working on an auto-generation system for our CQC product for a while now. This is the second generation of it, which will be coming out in the 4.1 version here a few weeks. There's still lots that can be done, and it will continue to be expanded in every subsequent release, but...

One of our customers did a nice video showing his setup. I put it up on our (new and still really just getting going) Youtube channel if anyone is interested: http://www.youtube.com/user/CharmedQuarkSystems It's a pretty nice look at what someone has done in terms of automating his home.

I've been working on a document that provides guidance to companies looking to create controllable hardware on how to create good control protocols. This is not intended to be super-technical, but mostly for the guy at the company who may be a programmer already but hasn't really gotten into...

Hey guys, here's our new web site which is going to go live in a few days when 3.4 is released. Anyone want to give it a look and provide feedback? It is based on MS' Silverlight technology, so you may be prompted to install the Silverlight runtime. It's nothing intrusive, just a few DLLs that...

This is just a heads up for anyone who has been thinking about coming on board with CQC. As you might know, we've always been in something of a bind wrt to pro installers. They don't like that we sell a DIY version which is effectively the same product, for a much lower price. They don't want...

I'm working on a set of tutorial and how-to videos for our upcoming 2.0 release. I've only got about 7 done so far, but I figured I'd make them known. These videos are much easier I think for folks to digest than the written tutorial was, so check them out and see if they make sense to you. The...