Time is sure flying by, and we’re moving forward with our anticipated projects. We’ve been receiving some great ideas from you here in the community and we want you to know that we’re certainly listening. Two of us had a setback with illness, and that’s delayed us a bit. That being said, we reached out to Oh-La International about changing gears and with their blessing, we’ve decided on a new approach. We were prepared to move forward without these steps, but we want to show that most of what you’ve been wishing for does exist. Instead, we would like to invite you to our crowdfunding campaign set to begin in January. We’ve decided to do this so that we can gauge interest in the product and also to enable us to make sure that we are developing and finalizing the last details of our ecosystem with your input and feedback. We want to make sure that everything is perfect, and to do that, your input is essential.
As you know, we’re writing this from the ground up, so I thought I’d drop a few Easter eggs to keep your interest. We’ve made it no secret that we will not be using Groovy. This does mean that “drivers” as you know them will not work the same, and you will find that “apps” as you know them are not needed, unless it’s for something like a lock manager, etc. How? Let’s just say that the ability to run code from open source projects, such as most NPM packages, slightly modified Node Red modules (without Node Red), and many other integrations can all be a part of our ecosystem. Any Typescript/JavaScript should run easily and with little to no modification. This means that you will have access to millions of open source projects. Anything is possible with external integrations as our ecosystem is a real time API.
Our immediate focus is to create a cohesive ecosystem so our initial focus will be on Zigbee, LAN (Wi-Fi, Gateways, RF, IR) and cloud integrations. In terms of hardware, of course we will have Z-Wave, Thread, and Bluetooth Mesh, but it will not be our main focus. We will be developing integrations for it as we move forward and will provide generic driver support of most commonly used devices.
We know that this could draw some concern, but let me reassure you that per our mission statement, we will always have the ability to very easily integrate with a variety of IoT systems to present those devices inside of ours for a cohesive ecosystem. We also want to reassure you that we haven’t lost sight of where we’ve come from. There will always be an ongoing path of support for our open source projects here. This means that Markus’ drivers and The Smartly project will continue to be supported no matter which direction the Collective Core takes.
We are also currently working on releasing devices with Tasmota pre-flashed. These will be coming in the near future, so do your research. They’re becoming more and more popular.