I was working on Decider the other night when I realized I was coming up to my 1000th commit in SVN. Curious, I pulled a log of Decider revisions to see when it was that I committed the very first revision of Venturii Decider. Would you believe that my first commit to the Decider repo was on Wednesday, March 16, 2011! Here is the notes from that initial entry:
r1 | cube | 2011-03-16 21:52:38 -0600 (Wed, 16 Mar 2011) | 5 lines Initial import. Scripts automatically install to /usr/local/etc/Venturii/ for config, and usr/local/bin for decider. :) :) :) Work in progress.
One might consider that date to be Decider’s birthday, though it’s origins date back a few years before I started using a versioning system. I remember tarball and gzipping my entire source tree whenever I wanted to “save” a particular version to fall back on in case subsequent changes became unstable or I needed to refer to deleted code later on. It is hard to believe I was able to accomplish as much with Venturii as I did without any version control, or at that time even an IDE! For years, I wrote Venturii using nothing more than Vim and gcc! My how things have changed since then…
At that time, I had created a number of Venturii modules for integrating with X-10 switches (remember those?!?), controlling Bosch Autodome PTZ cameras, integrating my DSC MAXSYS PC-4020 burglar alarm system through a PC-4401 RS-232 module, a module for talking to various Access Control I/O boards, one for reading analog sensor data from an ADC I/O module I bought from www.controlanything.com. Actually, I had initially called the project OpenHouse, but this sounded too much like it may be related to real estate so the name later changed to Venturii. I think I wrote up the story of the name somewhere else so I won’t recall it here.
The Bosch Autodome cameras I had set up around the house integrated with Venturii using the “twophase” module as I named it, which produced the necessary PTZ commands using the Autodome protocol, but I had a Philips LTC8780/60 Data Converter Unit translate the electrical signal from RS-232 to actual Biphase to go to each camera. The XR series Analog to Digital converter board was part of the original inception of Venturii, in that it was my first crack at reading analog sensor data from a LM34 temperature sensor in order to open and close the Honeywell ARD-5 damper I’d installed on the heat vent feeding my bedroom.
I never imagined back then that this humble creation would eventually be running entire buildings!