Lutron HomeWorks

Integrations
1

Does anyone here have experience with Lutron HomeWorks? Can it support control over HTTP?

I’ve gotten mixed responses about this, and it’s not clear from their docs. We’ve gotten this request from a few customers.

2

Lutron communicates via Telnet or TCP connection for 3rd Party devices. I am interested in seeing this work together also. Please reach out if i can help.

3

Sadly we don’t have TCP or Telnet, but rather HTTP or UDP (what we call BPUP).

But I do have two questions for you:

Q1

Any insight into deeper integration of HomeWorks, such as the integrations on this list? http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Company-Info/Pages/AboutUS/Partner-Affiliates/RSIntegration.aspx

Q2

Since HTTP rides on TCP, can HomeWorks be programmed to interact via HTTP? Perhaps the tricky part is dropping the TCP connection after every request, so that other clients can connect. (The Bond V2 HTTP server is single threaded, and does not (currently) support pipelining.)

<rant>

Incidentally, early in our development of Bond V2 we used just JSON exchange over TCP (Pigeon). Technically speaking it was more performant than HTTP (less overhead in code, bandwidth, and RAM), however we abandoned it for HTTP for several reasons:

  • HTTP had excellent libraries already available for mobile platforms, whereas using BSD sockets on mobile OSes was painful and inconsistent given the corner cases of different device manufacturers and changing network configurations as devices go on/off mobile networks. Apparently top-shelf networking libs on mobile do a fair bit of socket trickery that we were loath to reinvent.
  • HTTP was preferred by community integrators on most platforms
  • running both and HTTP server and a TCP server (two listen sockets) consumes too much RAM. Not really a technical problem for us right now, but I’d hate to commit to supporting a whole 'nother transport long-term across all product lines without a very good reason. We plan to support our hardware for a long time and every kilobyte of RAM counts after a few years of adding features to old hardware :slightly_smiling_face:
  • HTTP is much better suited to multi-client support than long-lived TCP connections. Right now we can have dozens of phones on the local network and they all interact with the same low-resource device swimmingly. Sure, we could have specified a connection model where the client (or server) hang up after an exchange, but then we are starting to re-invent HTTP.
  • using HTTP allows us to get WebGUI and browser integration for free
  • HTTP is a well-understood standard and there exist good utilities for testing (cURL, etc.)
1 Like
4

Merck,

Q1 & 2 … Lutron integrates with others in regards they can be controlled by others. I spoke with a friend at Lutron today and he said they do support UDP but its so they can be controlled and not others.
Currently the only way i know how to integrate Somfy is with the Somfy Connect LTI or the combination of parts (Digi One Ethernet to RS232 and Somfy URTS-II) where they listen for Lutron button presses over the network and then translate to RTS. Seems like it would be quite a bit of additional development to implement something like thing in the bond pro.

1 Like
5

Thanks so much for the reply. It sounds like the problem is, neither HomeWorks nor Bond Home are general purpose control systems. Both platforms seem to expect some 3rd-party control system to do the heavy lifting of integration.