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The Open Source HCS Project

New goal. maintain the HCS II project. Yup, most folks who have this system have moved onto newer technology. And that's not a bad thing. But the HCS II (and SpectraSense and BC180) are still running and can be quite useful. So some effort will be made to allow the HCS II to hook up with modern Smart Home technology.

The origianl aim of this project was for a stand alone home automation control system which consists of hardware (main controllers and remote networked controllers) and software to monitor and control various devices around your house. Current plans support using X10 wireless modules, Analog, Digital, and Voice input and output. Once the HCS is programmed the use of a PC is not required. The current HCS II meets many of these goals and the HCS_C extends these goals while providing future growth.

At the moment (Sunday, September 17,2017) many of the links are long gone. For instance we no longer have Bob Morrison's HCS_C link. So every effort will be made to clean this site up and add useful information on how to keep this running. I've also decided not to try and reimplement the HCS II's OS and XPRESS code under Linux. My ideas for modern HA systems now extend to things like using Node-Red and Asynchronous programming. Which is not real time but is flexible and scales pretty well (for this application). Also I really like HQTT sitting in the middle handling the data brokering. It allows for any from shell scripts to full fledge applications to play nice together.

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Current Status (briefly):

2017/09/17 - starting a bit of clean up

2012/01/21 - gHCS (a GNU HCS ;-) ) A side project and possible migration path for the HCS II. Sofar this is just in the planning phase.

2010/11/11 - Bob has further updated the HCS_C XPRESS to 1.10.

2009/07/22 - After a terribly long hiatus I'm back. I'll start working these pages to bring them more up to date and include a few new things. Hopefully it will gain some more attention like it deserves. :-)

William F. Sotomayor has post all the HCS II documentation to his site, thanks William!

2007/01/03 - Something really useful a link to the main software directory. Sorry I didn't include this to begin with.

2007/01/01 - Bob has announced a New daughtercard with Ethernet, Mini-Combo cards for the HCS-C. See Zeta Engineering for further details.

Also William Repository for older host/compiler and ROM images can be found on his web site. He also has an announcement Announcing early field test of new HCS II SC ROM. His web site also contains updated documentation.

2006/08/20 - I've posted an RFC (Request For Comment) on the Circuit Cellar BBS, under the HCS forum. Titled: RFC: HCS-L. Bob is still working on the HCS-C and he's much further ahead than I.

2006/08/17 - I'm again bringing my attention to the HCS II. I have 2 HCS IIs and I'd like to get them back up and running. So I hope to have more activity and better organization.

2005/02/24 - Bob has his HCS_C working with some XPRESS code. Meanwhile there is work underway to define a development environment to make it easier for others to get involved and help out with the work so Bob can get on to the network interface. Currently I have it defined as Eclipse, CDT, GNU ARM GCC. I hope to have the identical setup for Windows so we have a uniform enviroment. Other tools currently include Macraigor's JTAG interface (Linux & Windows support), Quartus II Web Edition Software (FPGA compiler) (I don't know if this will work under Linux/Wine), Borland C++ (3.0?), Dunfield's Micro-C, CCS C, ASL (HCS II Z180 assembler), Java and WATCOM C++.

2004/05/20 - Bob has produced a hardware masterpiece! The first prototype boards are out and I have mine (I've got 2M of RAM for debugging). Perhaps by mid-summer we'll have the network card but in the mean time we have work to do to get ECOS up and running on the HCS_C.

2004/03/09 - Bob Morrison has made tremendous progress on the design of the HCS_C and the network interface but has run into a software bug (which he caught!) and has to return to his studies. So the hardware has been delay until May (Sorry!). Further work will be done on the older A02 version so we can get the base OS up and running.

2004/03/01 - Bob has a wonderful design for the net card. It has the 16 bit AXIS chip and up to 512M SDRAM (depends on chips and config). Very nice!



HCS Web BBS:

Circuit Cellar has, for a number of years, run a BBS and newsgroups for it's audience. That BBS has now been retired in favor of the easier to use web based BBS. It's not just for this project but many other things related to Electronics and Computer Applications.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are properties of their respective owners. Forum comments are owned by the poster. The rest is copyright ©1999-2004 VA Linux Systems, Inc.

For further info email me at: ncherry@users.sourceforge.net.