I got a great email from Richard Perlman containing detailed information about the latest ICM update 2.8. Since people tend to end up here for info on the ICM he wanted to share it with the rest of you. Thanks Richard!

Many changes in the Vista ICM, some significant:

Most notable: Honeywell has discontinued the Vista ICM. It seems there was some disagreement with in2net over fees. Since in2net seems to have designed most of the internal code, it doesn't look good for further support. I have emailed them, but they don't reply. The immediate result is that email is effectively dead, unless you pay a fee. If you are running a DNS service on your network it should be simple to "deflect" the HTML connection used by the ICM to pass email messages to in2net to a local web server. Then you'd just have to figure out how they pack the email message into the HTML content.

Other things as of release 2.8:

1. There is no more backup (i.e. download). You can still upload, but "download" is pretty much limited to cat/copy/paste.
2. A lot of the web pages, like the PDA page, are now configured differently, not as easy to change.
3. I found the same TCP data that was on port 50003 on port 50001 too and I also found an in2networks debug facility of port 50501. But, I can't make any sense of it.

On the other hand, using the TCP interface I have been able to build a fairly simple state engine in Perl. This maintains a state table for each zone, as well as reporting the panel state. The script was customized to Interface to the Indigo home automation system running on a Mac. But, it could be easily modified to report to other services. Take a look at:

http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/userforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5444&p=32308&hilit=ademco#p32308

If there is sufficient interest maybe we can set up a small mail-list to share ideas and discoveries, etc.

Richard Perlman