Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 1—What is the Home Control Assistant?
The Home Control Assistant 7
The Design Pane
The left pane of the HCA Window, called the Design Pane contains a list of the elements of your
design. There are a few items not shown and these will be described later.
Every object in your design can have a name and most objects require a name. These names
appear in the design pane. Each object is also contained within a room or folder. You can have as
many objects as you need and place them in as many rooms or folders as you need. The only
limitation is that each item within the room or folder must have a unique name, and no room or
folder can contain another room or folder.
What’s the difference between a room and a folder? While rooms are a good way to organize your
device, programs, and groups, there are special operations that allow you to treat all the devices in
a “room” as a single set of devices. This is all explained in the chapter on rooms. Folders are much
simpler and are just an organizational method.
Hint: Rather than say “folder or room” everywhere, the term folder will be used and will mean
either folder or room unless otherwise stated.
Why would you want to organize your design info folders? One reason may be to help group those
things together that work in unison. For example one room may have three devices, a group, and 6
programs. All of these work together as part of your automation solution so it makes sense to have
them in one folder. And perhaps the folder name is the name of the room.
How do you organize things that don’t fit into a simple room-by-room organization? That’s up to
you! One way would be to have a folder called Home that contains all those items that work with
the house as a whole. Or have a folder for each floor that, in a similar way, contains things that
handle that floor.