home automation

We came to the same conclusion. There is no ideal home automation system as in reliable, secure and easy to operate -yet-. Another upcoming project...

What's your review of Insteon? ...Jim Thompson

Two in every room. Four in the TV room (TiVo, Playstation, Xbox...)

If it's only one in each room, you have to route tripwire across the door sometimes...

Much better to have basement and attic access. I'm on a slab and 2/3s of the house has cathedral ceilings. :-(

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UPB is supposed to be an open source spec. The company link is just one vendor for the technology.

Personally, most home automation is a waste of time. There are very few exceptions. One is occupancy sensors to control lighting. However, this is stand alone these days. Twenty years ago I was in a high end house where the lights would turn on and off as you walked around. Very expensive back then, now technology worthy of Home Depot.

Turning on the AC or heat remotely is useful if you have no one at home.

Last, there are schemes where in the event of a fire, the AC is turned off so as to not fan the flames. Conversely, if the CO2 or other fume detector goes off, it turns the AC on.

I've watched home automation demos at CES crash. Yeah, windows OS. One of the stupidest home automation things I saw was at the Microsoft smart house. The refrigerator was so damn smart that if the door was left open, it could email or IM you to close the door. Now if the fridge was a genius, it would close it's own damn door.

My opinion is that the smart grid is going to be a waste of taxpayer Dollars if there is no decent and affordable PLC available. And currently there isn't.

But Home Depot doesn't have it.

Many, many more applications. Just one example is pattern watch. If ol' Leroy hasn't opened his fridge in days and hasn't used the range the system could send out an alert to others, that it would be a good idea to check on ol' Leroy now. Can save lives. But neither the industry nor all those fancy committees with their Perrier water bottles understand that.

Much more acceptable would be a fridge that can communicate with the basement pantry and say "Hey, we're getting dangerously low on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale" :-)

It is pretty clever because they use two communication paths (X10 and RF) but the security they promiss is completely missing. They state their system is secure, but if you dig deeper then it turns out the security is optional for auxilary data. The generic communication is not encrypted in any way. And since they use a frequency band which is not available in Europe and only support 115V systems they are limited to the US.

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I could have sworn Home Depot had occupancy sensor switches. This is not as fancy as the low voltage control I saw in that "wired" house, but it would do the job. You should treat yourself (ha) to a CES trip at least once in your illustrious electronics career. Consultant is good enough to get a badge, but it won't get you any free meals. Now buyer is another story...

Yeah, the fridge is supposed to read RFID tags. Inventory control, expired food, stuff like that. RFID hasn't exactly set the world on fire, so I think a plain old barcode reader would be needed too.

If you have a Blackberry or Iphone, there are programs to read barcodes. Again, technology looking for a need. Free on the blackberry (EDOCRAB, i.e. barcode spelled backwards), and of course you get to pay for it on the iphone (Redline). There is a free 2D barcode reader and companion writer program for the Blackberry. A friend is trying to use it for inventory control for camping trips. Like a simple list of items that you check off isn't good enough?

Those don't cut it. Has to be able to be operated from a central controller like X-10 does. On days when it works ...

I know a couple who keeps complete computerized inventory control on everything. I don't want to live there :-)

Yep, the good old checklist. Good enough. Sometimes it's best to look at how aircraft are operated, it doesn't get much more efficient and secure than that.

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Hope you caught the Boeing 747 "checklist" video before it got yanked due to copyright problems. Virgin Atlantic I think, so we had checklists with a fine British accent.

Years ago Echelon was trying to hire me when they were in their start up phase. My hope was a power line comm that actually worked, but the brass was stupid beyond belief. Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Condie would have done a better job than those clowns. Anyway, first bit of stupidity is it had to be a single chip solution that connected to the line. Second stupidity is neural networks were required. Yeah well, no thanks. How the hell these idiots get venture capital is beyond. me. Stock peaked at 100, now 11.

Before that was availible, I used:

over 10 years ago for some of the lights inside my house.

I am not surprised :-)

That is _not_ home automation. First of all $40 is way too much, nobody would bite. Second, neither of them has any method whatsoever to be controller from a central location or from several locations away from the device. Ain't gonna fly.

That's a simple motion detector. Light goes out, flail with arms, maybe that makes it turn on again. Or maybe not.

Honey I just flushed turd 87232-13424 Yuk!

Even though I have an extensive clientele list for RFID tags, I think many are just a waste of time... bar codes work very well, and very cheaply for _many_ applications.

I've often wondered why they weren't used for tolls... just a sticker in the left rear side window... trivial to read with a scanner... and dirt cheap. ...Jim Thompson

California is a smidgen farther advanced: Fastrak. You get a little RF pod that goes on the dash or somewhere. Now you can whiz through the lanes with the Fastrak logo and not even stop. A scanner would fail the minute you have snow on the area with the bar code, like right now. RF usually gets through.

Oh, and have you seen some of the hippie buses? The grime accumulating on there would make your barcode system fail quickly. With some of them I have the impression their last car wash was at dealer delivery 25 years ago.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

You can't require effectively people to keep their vehicles clean enough to read the bar code, maybe?

RFID has plenty of benefits over bar codes with the one damning problem that traditionally it's cost 10-1000x as much as bar codes... there are a lot of articles out there on people trying to get the cost of RFID tags down to the "penny" range that bar codes are.

Florida has the same system. In fact, it was on the news last night with the claim that eliminating most of the toll booths has reduced accidents by 80%.