Smart Home Automation Systems with x10 controllers

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Hawking is a relative newcomer to the Home Automation System market. One system is worth mentioning though: The Hawkings Home Remote Pro – Home Automation Gateway. A comprehensive system that is capable of remote monitoring, remote controlling and remote securing your home.

Via the installed gateway the Home Automation System can be accessed remotely via a web browser or via a cell phone. This suddenly opens up all kind of extra features for your Home Automation System.

Remote monitoring
With installed security video cameras a peek in your house from all over the world becomes reality. Keeping an eye out on the kids, or the pet, right from your cell phone or your secured webpage online gives you the comfort you need.

Remote control
You can log in your Home Automation System straight from work, and set the security system with a new access code for your early arriving friends. After a specified set time the code will be deactivated again if you like.

Remote secure
Your Home Automation System can act as a notifier and send you an alerts on your cell phone when a security breach occurs.

The Hawkings Home Remote Pro Home Automation Gateway comes with a small service fee. The Basic Level service comes for free.

As with everything, starting simple is the best way to tackle a project. For Home Automation this would be starting with one of the most basic automation system, a Smart Home Light System.

The Smart Home Light System is an investment which will pay back for itself over time. It will detect motion in a room and turns on/off the lights. This will save energy and make your life a little more easy and comfortable and even smarter!

How it works
A motion sensor is a passive system that detects infrared energy. Humans have a skin temperature of 93 F (34 C), which emits waves in the infrared spectrum (8-10 micrometers). The motion sensor detects these waves and sends a signal to turn on the lights.

The detector is set to react to rapid changes of infrared energy. This avoids the system to react to heaters turning on, or electrical blankets warming up. In this way only a person walking into the motion detectors field of view, will set the system in working and turns on the light.

The trouble
Picture yourself in bed, reading a book. Not much motion is going on and the Smart Home Light System will turn off the lights automatically after a while. You find yourself waving to the dark ghosts in your room, to turn the lights back on. This is a real problem and the Smart Home Lighting Systems fails in those instances.

The best alternative is to switch off the light in a series of dim downs. As the light dims, you find yourself still waving to turn the light back on to full power, but this time at least not in the total dark.

One alternative that is being suggested is to let the Smart Home Light System detect when an object, in this case the human, is on stage and only turns the light on. The person determines the length of the stay and turns the light off upon exit. No more waving, but the main advantages is lost in this way. Automatically turning off lights in rooms not occupied. I would not call it a fully automated lighting system either.

Another alternative is to pre-set a specific time before the Smart Home Light System will turn of the lights again. Very workable for a garage, but not a very desirable solution for the bedroom or kitchen.

The near future
Instead of infrared based motion detectors, full optical detection systems (cameras) can be used. A simple version (used in detecting cars waiting for a traffic light) is based on the differences between the image of an empty room and an occupied room. No object can however be moved in the room, without recalibrating the system. A better but still to expansive optical detection system would be a system used in the Xbox-Kinect. This system has a 3 dimensional face recognition feature inside, which would be a little bit over the top for our Smart Home Light System.

An extra benefit!
Connecting your regular lights with the Home Automation System now turns them into dim lights.

Further exploring
The one leading company in the Smart Home Light System is Phillips. In April 2010, the special program, Philips Dynalite Dimension was launched and gave the Smart Home Automation a considerable push forward.

X10
Home Automation can be as simple as to group controls (think of when opening the garage door, the lights in the house switch on), and can get as complex as remote control over all appliances in your house (think of turning on the heater on the way home, or even better the coffee machine).

What all the systems will have in common is a language to communicate between each individual appliance in the system. A language originally coined by a Scottish company called Pico Electronics in 1975 is X10. Even nowadays X10 is still the most common used “system” for Home Automation.

Functionality
The communication is done over ordinary electrical wiring. But there is also a radio protocol defined (this however needs some additional hardware). The X10 signal consists out of little bursts of radio waves representing a digital signal.
The protocol consists out of 3 segments: a house code, a unit code, a command code.
The 4 bit house code (A to P) can divide your house in 16 areas (the kitchen, the office or all lights, all heaters).
The 4 bit unit code (1 to 16) can address 16 different appliances within a house code.
This makes a total amount of 256 (16 house codes x 16 unit codes) possible addresses (read appliances).
The command codes are handling the message send to the address.

So for example:
The garden has house code B.
The lights in the garden have unit code 3.
The sprinklers in the garden have unit code 5.

Sending the code: B3-off followed by B5-on, will turn off the lights in the garden, before turning on the sprinklers. All from within the comfort of your house. It gets even better when programming the system with a routine. At 7pm / B3-on, at 9pm / B3-off and B5-on, at 9:30 pm / B5-off and B3-on, creates an automatic garden watering program without exposing the turned on lights to water.

Phase Couplers
The X10 system operate seamlessly on most devices but runs into issues with high voltage appliances like washer, a dryer and the electric stove. This can however be solved by introducing additional phase couplers to distribute the X10 signal between the different phases.

Repeaters
Like any other signal the X10 signal incurs loss over a distance greater than 240 feet of electrical wiring and that includes the junction boxes. For houses larger than 2000 square feet, this is not an uncommon situation. In this case a repeater system which boost the X10 signal is needed.

Further recommendation
With this brief introduction into X10 for Home Automation we have provided you with a starting point in getting your “Do it yourself automation project” on the roll. Here is an easy to understand home automation book to get your projects on the way.

The three major home automation technologies that are in the top of the ranks are Insteon, X10 and Z-Wave. The difference between them is worth pondering over when it comes to the decision which Home Automation System to use.

The X10 technology
It is the oldest system and is the pioneer when it comes to home automation. Originally started with Sears to automate their facilities, now the major player in home applications. The X10 technology is based on existing electrical wires and doesn’t interfere with other radio frequency system in a house. It is the most widespread and mature  system, but its reliability is not always the best.

The Z-Wave technology
The company Zensys, in the need for speed and range, developed the Z-Wave RF radiation technology. It has proven a worth while technology that is faster than the X10 technology. Its is a very new technology and the amount of modules is still limited.

The Insteon technology
The Insteon system takes advantage of both the power line controller (PLC) and RF radiation method in controlling all the equipments in the home. The system is backwards compatible with the X10 technology, meaning that Insteon and X10 modules can coexist on the same power line network and Insteon modules can be setup to respond and transmit X10 as well as Insteon commands. Still developing, but this system might be the future.

You woke up this morning and took a shower. You went to the kitchen and prepared yourself some breakfast. And now you are sitting here, staring into your coffee, wondering what next. Oh yes, work. The same old routine, day in day out and you will keep doing it for the next 20 years. Will you?

Your thought go back to the sixties (or eighties) when the Jetsons gave you an image of the future, this future, the 21st century. But where is Rosie, the robot maid making your life easier and where are all the push-button Space Age envisioned conveniences? This would have made for sure the daily routine more fun.

Well the future is here and it is called Smart Home Automation or Smart Home Assistant. Cool gadgets that will break your day and make your life easier. This time it is for real, and not in some distant future. What about an automated pet feeder, an automated plant watering system, automatic window shutters, automatic climate control, just to name a few. Devices to control your house are now the reality and they are called Smart Home Devices.

Some years ago this technology was expensive and only for the rich, today these systems became affordable and will even save you some money in the long run. Research is in full swing and everyday new possibilities are entering the market.

Awareness about these devices is slowly spreading among mainstream customers, but you are informed and ready to enter the futuristic utopia of 2010.