This is from a Commercial guy with Residential coworkers (including helping with development of an extension…which is just plain painful) so take it for what it is:

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There are (at least two) two types of customers: The fiddly, “I want to be able to do anything and everything with any widget I can think of, for a system of any size or complexity” and the “I want a level of integration and I’ll more or less take what I can get”

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Crestron Home is very well suited for the latter – if you can control the rules of engagement and the client is OK with more or less ‘standard’ functionality, and nothing too crazy as far as size or scope that’s exactly the niche that Crestron Home appears to play nicely with. The tradeoff, of course, is you are given a sandbox and going out of that sandbox is difficult/painful/impossible depending on what exactly you’re trying to do.

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On the other hand the former is not well suited for Crestron Home, IMO – if you have weird subsystems, a giant property (or interdependent properties), very specific preferences on operation, etc. – that’s where full custom programming makes sense. Of course the tradeoff is higher overall costs.

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Think of it like “tract home” vs “custom home” – sure in the tract home you might be able to change paint colors, carpet vs wood, etc. but by and large the floorplan is going to be the floorplan, the windows will be where the windows are and it might look like 6 other houses on the block (funny story from high school below)… but the cost per square foot is going to be lower because an architect is copy-pasting, the builders have muscle memory, and the overall attention to detail may not be a strong. On the other hand with a full-custom luxury build… You want 90,000 square feet? Done. Want 2 bathrooms for every bedroom? Done. Need a walk-in closet bigger than some European countries? No problem. Helipad? Sure. But you pay (not just in cash) for that flexibility.

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Lincoln

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(Ok so, I grew up in suburban Southern California… the land of the endless subdivision. My neighborhood had more variety than some – we had square accent windows and brown trip while the look-alike 3 lots down had rounded windows and grey trim, such variety! Other neighborhoods weren’t as diverse. One of my science teacher/swim coaches in particular, lived in a neighborhood where someone just fell asleep on the Ctrl+V button. One night he was startled to find a somewhat drunken neighbor stumble into his living room… not only did their houses look exactly the same 6 doors apart but they had happened to get locks using the same keys)

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Lincoln King-Cliby, CTS, DMC-E-4K/T/D
Commercial Market Director
Sr. Systems Architect | Crestron Certified Master Programmer (Diamond)
ControlWorks Consulting, LLC
Direct: (+1)440.771.4807 | Cleveland: (+1)440.449.1100? | Boston: (+1)508.695.0188 | DC: (+1)202.381.9070? | Fax: (+1)440.449.1106
Crestron Services Provider | Biamp Authorized Independent Programmers | Extron Qualified Independent Programmer

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From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of zac.sparrow@...
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2021 4:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [crestron] Crestron Home Driver Using the Driver SDK

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Sorry for the slight off tipic...
I am still trying to understand the purpose of Crestron Home. From Crestron prospective,? to capture more client base with same hardware but handicapped functionality.? Sounds good on paper but if it is so complicated to write a driver,? how are they attacking more vendors or are all drivers written by them? They seemed to be fully committed to it.

From dealer prospective,? limited numbers of vendors and models they can use. Must be a big issue now with the low stock of everything.?
Then when the client says 6 months in "I need this XYZ integrated" (XYZ being whatever the latest gimmick is), how do you tell them it can't be done?

From client's prospective,? cheaper but not customizable and limited life *cough* pyng *cough*

Yet I've seen multiple people that are Crestron savvy switching their personal systems from SIMPL to Home. So confusing.

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Sorry for the slight off tipic...
I am still trying to understand the purpose of Crestron Home. From Crestron prospective,? to capture more client base with same hardware but handicapped functionality.? Sounds good on paper but if it is so complicated to write a driver,? how are they attacking more vendors or are all drivers written by them? They seemed to be fully committed to it.

From dealer prospective,? limited numbers of vendors and models they can use. Must be a big issue now with the low stock of everything.?
Then when the client says 6 months in "I need this XYZ integrated" (XYZ being whatever the latest gimmick is), how do you tell them it can't be done?

From client's prospective,? cheaper but not customizable and limited life *cough* pyng *cough*

Yet I've seen multiple people that are Crestron savvy switching their personal systems from SIMPL to Home. So confusing.

Lol - I can draw metaphors with the best of ‘em!
I love skiing, but I’m not that great, and age is starting to out-strip my ability. ?The result being injury!

The reason I (and others) have said that Extension Devices are easier to implement than other CCD device types is kind of a "bad thing" if you're looking to be a CCD purist.
It's largely because you have greater opportunity to NOT follow the CCD SDK architecture and go off-piste.

CCD has a specific architecture which is (very roughly) a base driver class, coupled with a transport (e.g. TCP, Serial, ...) and a device (or device family) specific protocol (e.g. the language the device speaks).? These classes are dependant upon one another and need to interact in some very specific ways to work properly, such as device instantiation and removal - what does my device do at start-up, how do I clean up after myself, are commands fire and forget, or do we need to maintain a connection, what happens when the connection is broken, and so on.? In the case of a Display, Cable box or AVR, you really need to stay in your lane for this stuff - but it's often not apparent (from the docs/samples) how you're supposed to do that.

As Caleb pointed out - you find your way through a lot of trial and error, which isn't where we want to be as driver developers.

Extension devices are a bit different - because the consuming app (i.e. Crestron Home) doesn't have any understanding of what the driver actually *does*, it's easier (or less improper) to break out of the CCD mould and implement your transport and protocol any way you like, and if you already have that code from a SIMPL#/S+ version, then it's either that, or re-write the older driver code from scratch in a CCD conformant architecture.

Even so, Extension devices have other elements that "normal" drivers don't - such as the UI definition, translation files, and - most likely - a heavier reliance on User Attributes (a CCD way of passing in custom data).? They all come with their own ways to trip you up on your first few outings... or even after a few years!

And before anyone asks - yes - the frustrations and challenges and suggestions on where improvement can/should be made is all reported back to Crestron, directly into the drivers team & product managers.

i think the link is going to the previous article on shelly?

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I've had a request to port the Weatherflow Tempest weather station driver I wrote to Crestron Home.? How bad can it be.? So, I downloaded the driver SDK from crestron.com/developer and got it installed on my laptop.? Then I started to try and dig in.? Crestron supplies a bunch of sample projects so I figured that was the best place to start.? I could find a nice simple sample and then start digging through the code and the help files to see what is going on.

Now my understanding is that a driver for an extension device, like a weather station, is the easiest type of driver to create so again, how bad can it be.?

So, I look at the extension driver samples and there is one for a door lock.? Opening up the sample Crestron has chosen to include every possible bit of functionality you can think of for a door lock.? It includes access list support, jam support, and the list goes on.? All that extra functionality in a sample that you are using to try and just get started with something new obfuscates the underlying structure you are trying to understand.

When I want to start learning something new I want to start at the "see spot run" level.? As stupid simple as possible.? Once I have a clue I can take baby steps and move onward to something a bit more complex.? Now a door lock isn't like trying to learn to speak English by trying to read "War and Peace" but with all the added functionality Crestron included it is certainly at the level of a novel by Earnest Hemingway.?

So, this saga finally brings me to my question.? Does anyone, who has gone down this path before me, have a really, really, really basic example of an extension driver they are willing to share?? Something at the level of controlling an IoT relay from Crestron home where all you can do is turn it on/off.?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Jay