John in VA said:
The driver installs on a PC that has network access to both the ISY and the Premise Server. An XDO needs to be imported into Premise to create all of the ISY devices classes. The driver itself uses the SOAP Web Services interface built into the ISY, and does not depend on any ISY programming.
As to your question of why would one controller want to control another, that's bordering on philosophy :blink: .
The ISY is very good at low level communications with a variety of devices. Premise has the ability to abstract low-level devices, and create very complex scenarios combining lighting, environmental, security, media etc. For example, in my setup I can select a movie to watch within Premise and simply tell it to play in the living room. Premise dims the lights, lowers the shades, allocates the resources necessary to play the movie, powers-up the devices, sets the devices to the appropriate inputs, and starts the media streaming. The ISY only handles the Insteon devices (e.g. lighting). Other Premise drivers handle the TV, UPnP Media server, etc. Premise's built in abstractions for the various devices and media make it very easy to orchestrate all of this without writing a bunch of code.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the explanation but your concept of the ISY sounds like many years out of date.
Currently ISY owners are interfacing natively with X10, Insteon, ZWave, ZigBee, Elk security, Weather sources, and via Node servers with Hue, Milights, Wink, CAO Tags, WC8, Amazon Echo, Kodi/XBMC, Infrared controllers, Thermostats( ecobee3, Honeywell, Nest, Venstar) and the list goes on. I can't tremember half of what people are doing with it. I use it as server for some java script and a logging database, and system, for my HVAC system. UDI was just granted $3.4 million in funds to develop more home ADR systems for residential energy saving systems.
I would have loved to write and have total control over my own HA system, myself, but when ISY994 does more than I could ever hope to do and grows more everyday, I can't be bothered to write more code, after 42 years of tiring from it. I would have used the Insteon Hub (without any advanced logic capability, and cheaper) for a one box interface but ISY994 supports so many well documented interface protocols to probably make your job getting to Insteon, and many other protocols, much simpler.
Perhaps the marriage can accompptlish some more powerful concepts not possible before.
Others have interfaced with ISY994 for a bridge but ended up dropping the original logic after seeing the capabilities of this little 3 watt box.