Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 3—Your Home
2 The Home Control Assistant
The Quick Start Wizard
The best way to begin if you are new to home automation or using HCA is the Quick Start Wizard.
The purpose of this wizard is to create the start of a home automation solution for your home. The
first part of the Wizard is a tutorial to introduce you to the concepts and terms used in later steps.
The Wizard then asks questions about your lifestyle and what rooms your home has and asks you
to select which lights and appliances to control. Having completed that, the Wizard creates the
devices, programs, groups, schedules, and displays of an HCA design. A report is also created
showing all your automation devices, a parts list, and some installation tips.
All homes are different, and the Wizard can't anticipate all your needs. What is created is designed
to give you a start. After the Wizard completes, we expect that you will modify and extend your
home design to add additional hardware.
The number of steps in the wizard and the length of time to complete it depends upon your answers
as you go along. In the lower left corner of each dialog box is the current step number and the
total number of steps.
To begin a new home design with the Quick Start Wizard, on the Home Control Assistant menu
bar, click File, and then choose New and click the
Quick Start button in the Which wizard to use
dialog box.
Once you have completed the Quick Start Wizard, the next step you should take is to save your
design.
Hint: Before beginning the Quick Start Wizard, you should verify that your automation interfaces
are connected to the computer and that the interfaces are working. To do this, select
HCA
Options
from the application menu and select your interfaces and their communications
ports in the
Hardware tab. The Connect button verifies that each interface is correctly
connected and working.
Hint: The Quick Start Wizard saves all the information that it collects from you each time it is
used. After you have used the Quick Start Wizard once, you can start over or reuse the
information you entered previously. If the Wizard has saved information it will ask if it
should reload that information or start anew.