[Hai-users] Upgrade from Omni Pro to ?

[Larry Huppert]

I have an Omni Pro and have been considering an upgrade to the automation controller.  I've been missing some of the stuff available with Compose lighting and an infrastructure for voice announcement support.  From a brief review of what is out there, there seems to be several different directions I could head.

1)  The most natural upgrade would be to replace the Omni Pro with an Omni Pro II.

2)  The second direction would be to replace the Omni Pro with an Elk M1G.  It seems like the M1G has come a long way fairly quickly (assuming it works without a rash of bugs).  I've done some playing around with the Elk RP Demo software and very much like the organization of the software and the programming capabilites.  Some stuff is easier to do in each system, but overall the organization, readability and capabilities available with Elk automation rules seems more advanced at first blush.  For example, I like the ability to read thermostat modes, setpoints and current temperatures and base rules on those factors.  With this information, it would be pretty easy to write some rules that did adaptive recovery from temperature setback.  The M1G doesn't seem to have the breadth of support with regard to 3rd party integration products, nor some of the window dressing software like weblink II or controls for Windows media center.  Has anyone out there done a detailed analysis of how the M1G compares with the Omni Pro II?

3)  The third approach is to keep my Omni Pro as a security and sensor I/O controller, and move all higher level programming to a PC based package like Homeseer.  Homeseer also seems to have some sort of embedded PC like system which doesn't use a hard disk.  I'd guess this system is based off some version of Windows CE and uses flash based storage.

Any wisdom on the virtues and problems of these approaches would be appreciated.
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