How it works

Whzan operation is best explained with an example. Looking at the simple animation below, (that was created with Whzan) the sequence starts by the user clicking the screen based switch in a browser window (anywhere in the world).  Then follow the steps listed below the illustration describing what happens.

Before this animation, the user has downloaded and installed the Whzan X10 Gateway onto his local PC, added one light to his home automation system and used a template in the Whzan mimics editor to create a simple Mimic consisting of a switch and a light.  There are two datapoints for each X10 device, one to command the device and another to report the light's actual status.

1) The sequence starts with the user clicking the switch on the Whzan Mimic , the switch moves to the "on" position.

2) The switch Mimic is bound to a Whzan datapoint (i.e. the datapoint value will be updated when the switch changes) and the datapoints informs Whzan that the datapoint has changed from 0  to 1 (i.e. 'on' or 'true'). 

3) The X10 Gateway running on the user's home PC is interested in the switch datapoint, and next time it checks in with Whzan, it is told that the datapoint has been updated to 1 signalling 'on'.

4) The X10 Gateway program has been configured to know that the datapoint in question represents the requested state of this particular light and issues an X10 command over the house wiring to turn the light on.

5) The X10 Gateway checks the X10 device and can confirm that the light has actually come on and send Whzan a message that the second datapoint, i.e. representing the light's actual status, has changed to 1.

6) Next time the Mimic checks in with Whzan it is told that the light status of the datapoint has changed to 1 and it knows that the light animation is bound to the status value so the light animation transforms the on-screen lamp to the on-state.

All done, the sequence takes a little while to complete because there are the internet transmission times and the update rates to consider. But at the end of the process, we have confirmation from the X10 controller that the light device is in the on-state.