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FAQs
This is a compendium of the most commonly asked project questions. If you don't find response to one, please submit your question the the project administrator.
No. The STEAM specification, based on abstracting the phisical layout items in assemblies composed by artifacts, allows modelling virtually any item suitable to be automated. So, for instance, by creating new assemblies from the already defined artifacts, or even defining new artifacts, is possible to extend the STEAM application scope to other areas, as diy robotics.
Potentially yes. However this specific area, where maybe security or criticity requirements can be present, is not initially addressed by STEAM.
Yes. The STEAM specification supports the coexistence of different kinds of Litems from the perspective of both their features (what they do) and specifications (how they do it), including the Litem network technology. Therefore different concentrators, supporting different Litem networks, are supported by a single manager.
Having into consideration that a concentrator is the entity that links a set of Litems with a manager, whatever the Litem network protocol was, the most of the times it will be a physical device. Some of these scenarios could be those where the Litems are based on DCC, 802.15.4 or Zigbee, for instance.
However not in all the cases the concentrator must be a specialized hardware device. If the manager runs on a hardware with capabilities to reach the Litem network without aditional hardware (as for instance a laptop with BLE managing BLE Litems), the concentrator will be implemented as a software layer running o the same manager hardware. Even though the manager was not running on a hardware able to reach the Litem network, a passive network bridge could be used (as for instance a pasive DCC bridge connected to a computer by its serial port) and, again, the concentrator would be a software layer running on the manager hardware and reaching the Litem network via the DCC bridge.
Yes, that is one of the STEAM project design premises. By integrating different STEAM concentrators with the STEAM manager, different litems can coexist in the same layout. So, for instance, BLE based litems could coexist with Zigbee litems whenever two gateways (a BLE STEAM concentrator and a Zigbee STEAM concentrator) were integrated with the manager.