It’s been a little while since our last update and we’d like to give everyone a quick update to let you know that everything is still on track both for the Luminode and now for our Raspberry Pi based learning integration system.
We are expecting to receive our first test production run of 50 Luminodes by the end of next week and we hope to hear word on UL approval shortly thereafter. Once we have UL signoff and have verified the quality on the 50 Luminode test run we will initiate our first full production run! Assuming all goes well we will be shipping Kickstarter rewards and other pre-orders by the end of January!
Not only are we shipping the Luminode we are also pursuing FCC approval for the RazBee radio board! This turns the Raspberry Pi into a Luminode gateway and learning based system integration device! It is also an open platform that can be reprogrammed with ZigBee or other protocols.
If all goes well we hope to offer to Kickstarter backers whose pledges include the USB dongle the option of receiving a full RazBee kit including Raspberry Pi in place of the dongle for no extra cost to you! Stay tuned for more details!
Thanks from all of us at Think Automatic and the Luminode project!
Can you post a list of the protocols that are currently supported and ones that planned?
We are working on putting together detailed documentation as well as a simple SDK to help people get started. But to give you a quick answer, the learning platform currently speaks XML with JSON support planned. This means that developing your own drivers for your own hardware is very straight forward. This also means that it is easy for device manufacturers to write their own drivers as well.
We plan to ship the starter kits with drivers we’ve written for Insteon and the NetworX security panel in addition to Luminode drivers, which are very simple since they speak XML natively. We also plan to develop drivers not only for ZigBee through the RazBee/Raspberry Pi, but also through other gateways such as ZWave and others.
In addition we plan to work directly with the Ubi folks and the LumenCache folks (http://LumenCache.com). We also plan to explore integration with SmartThings and others.
From the other direction, if you want to integrate the Luminode with your existing system, that will vary a bit depending on what you’re trying to do. But our wireless protocol for the Luminode (which we plan to open up for other embedded developers to use) speaks XML (and eventually JSON as well) through the USB dongle. The protocol coexists fine with ZigBee, ZWave and others.
I hope that helps!