Home Automation – Part 2 (Planning)

The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don’t have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a money pit. The first step in developing a plan is to establish the scope.

Home automation is a broad term. I would define it simply as automating things in your home. The age-old and most trivial example is the "automated" coffee pot that comes on automatically at a certain time and when you arrive in the kitchen the coffee is ready. At the other end might be an automated home theatre. When you push the "Watch a movie" button in the kitchen, the lighting begins to dim behind you and light up in front of you on your way into the theatre. As the screen comes down from the ceiling, the projector rises from a cabinet in front of it. As the projector bulb warms up the lighting in the theatre synchronously dims until it is movie time. There is a wide range of things in between these two examples. I would break the scope into the following areas below. Any one of them can add a lot of fun and functionality.

System design
Security
Lighting control
Audio distribution
Video distribution
Universal remotes
Home theatre
Appliance control
Spa control
Sensors

Remote access

These are the nine areas I will be writing about and then will conclude with stories on project management and changes and upgrades. I don’t mean to imply by the outline that I have all the answers on the topics. My intent is to share what I have learned in hope that it will be useful to others.

It is also important to think about what is not part of the scope of your home automation endeavors. One example that we decided to exclude is irrigation. The Irritrol Total Control system has four independent programs which offer concurrent operation seven days per week or only odd days or even days. It is totally reliable and totally flexible. It is tied to a roof sensor so it doesn’t irrigate when it is raining. In other words, it does everything you could imagine and it is really easy to use. Why would anyone want to automate something that is automated? There actually are some examples that I will explain in the security and spa control areas but for something as self-contained as an irrigation system there is really nothing to be gained by tying the irrigation sub-system into an overall system.

You actually can tie an Irritrol system to your PC and do the control from there. Unfortunately, most sub-systems that are "PC Controlled" require Windows. One of the decisions I made as part of my scope was not to use Windows. Have you ever had to re-boot your PC? Would you like to re-boot your house? Me neither. If you decide to go with a Windows approach I highly recommend using a dedicated system. It doesn’t have to be the latest or greatest and does not require a big video display. For less than $500 you can get a PC and put it in the basement or out of the way.

The other area that we excluded from the overall system is digital door locks. I investigated this quite a bit and found some interesting technology, including fingerprint activated locks. There are advantages to having a system know when a door was opened or closed but that can be accomplished in other ways that I will describe when we get to "sensors". Bottom line, based on the technology available and the appearance of the locks, I decided that getting into the house should not be dependent on a central system, no matter how reliable it is. We chose the Weiser Powerbolt Digital locks for all the doors.

Not sure how long it is going to take me to write the remaining dozen or so stories and there will likely be other topics and stories interspersed. Stay tuned.

Home Automation

Home automation has been one of my hobbies for more than twenty-five years. In the early days it was mostly lighting control using X10 technology. There was a PC program written by a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center that calculated the precise time of the daily sunset and at that time signal went across the electrical wiring of the house and turned on some exterior lighting. At midnight the lights would turn off. Since that time I have learned a lot about home automation and after Year 2000, when I began to think about e-tirement from IBM, I also started planning a new “smart home”. It became home at the end of March 2002.

I have not written about my home up to this point, somewhat out of modesty but also not sure how many people are interested in home automation. I ran into Steve Hamm from BusinessWeek last April in Rome at the Business Leadership Forum and he convinced me to open up about the subject. Steve visited in September and I was confident he would write something thoughtful. There was a follow-on visit by BusinessWeek TV and Greg Clarkin. Their filming ended up on BusinessWeek Weekend (carried by ABC-TV) on the Sunday after Christmas. The story ran in the January 22, 2007 issue, pages 82-83. Here are links to the story and video.

Ultimate Wired Home: A look at a computer-controlled home
King Of His Digital Castle

Not so sure about “master” and I certainly don’t think of my home as a “castle” but now that the cat is out of the bag, I have decided to write a series of stories to share the details about the home automation system in the hope that it will be useful to others. I will include what went into the planning, what technology choices I made, the design choices, and what I have learned. Stay tuned.

Visa 2000

The upcoming trip to China requires a visa and the visa application requires a passport photo. The instructions were clear that it should not be a "home photo". I was anxious to get the application in the mail and was confident that the processor of the application would not reject my photo printed from the Canon i960, but unfortunately it was out of one of the ink colors. No problem, I though, there is a CVS store nearby and they do passport photos. The $7.99 price seems high but I was in a hurry. I like CVS as a company but their customer service in the store is not that great. The photo department had a sign up saying to check with a cashier. The cashier lines were all long. A supervisor happened to walk by and sent someone over to take the photo.

In a minute or so a digital picture was taken and the CVS person then escorted me to one of their Kodak kiosks. Of the five kiosks, two were "out of order" — reminded me of the early days of the airline check-in kiosks. Two of the other three were being used by customers who were sorting through the pages of pictures to pick the ones they wanted to print. I could see they were going to be there quite a while. The "available" kiosk was hung up. The employee had to unplug it to get it to re-boot. It took at least ten minutes for the kiosk to initialize — it was running Windows 2000.

Why Kodak or CVS did not select Linux for this application is beyond me. Linux is perfect for "embedded" applications — either embedded in a handheld device, a car, a digital audio server, home automation system, or a digital video recorder. Linux can also be "embedded" in a PC in a very nice way, especially on a PC like a kiosk which only runs one application. In all these cases Linux is quietly working in the background to enable the device or the application. It doesn’t crash, doesn’t give insulting or confusing error messages, "blue screens", or hang up. It just works.

Munir Kotadia at ZDNet Australia just wrote a story saying that the launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market.

Other patrickWeb stories about Linux

IBM Happenings: December 2006

The month of December at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly interested to see that IBM and Circuit City Stores, Inc. are exploring how to apply virtual worlds and 3-D environments to retail business models.The result could lead to new growth areas. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

iPhone

A friend of mine who knows a lot about investing told me years ago to not confuse a great company with a great stock. Apple Inc. finished the day at $97 per share which is 42.79 times earnings and represents a market capitalization of $83.4 billion, roughly double the value of Motorola. So I am not so sure it is a great stock at $97 but it surely is doing great things — things that investors and consumers really like.

Sales growth for the iPod dropped off to a mere 75% rate for the fiscal year compared to 409% growth the year before. The iPod has achieved 62% market share and the launch of Microsoft’s Zune does not seem to have made a dent. Meanwhile Apple has sold two billion songs, 50 million television shows and 1.3 million movies through iTunes. Potentially even more significant is the new iPhone which Steve Jobs unveiled at Macworld in San Francisco on Tuesday.

There is a lot to like about the iPhone and it may potentially change the direction of mobile phones in a major way and give a lot of competition to Palm and Blackberry "smart phones". The iPhone features a 3.5 inch touch-screen display and it is really smart. Various sensors allow the iPhone to detect when you hold it up to your ear so it can turn off the display and to automatically change the orientation of the display depending on whether you are holding it horizontally or vertically. The iPhone has only one button. compared to more than forty on existing high-end phones. If it is as easy to use as an iPod, I think it will be a real winner, not only as a way to enjoy music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies but also surfing the web, looking up contacts and managing email and text messages.

There is one thing that I don’t like about the iPhone and that is the exclusive arrangement with Cingular. A Cingular phone works in many countries around the world — but it doesn’t work where I live because there is no signal. I also don’t like the fact that Apple has made an exclusive deal. Nice for them but it takes choice away from the users. The iPhone has a slot where you put the Cingular SIM (Subscriber Identigy Module) card — looks like the chip in a smartcard — that contains your Cingular account identity. People should have a choice to change from Cingular to T-Mobile or other GSM operators around the world. If you want to change to a different operator, you get another card and put it in the iPhone. (When I am in Norway I put a Ventelo card in my Palm 680). If a better iPhone comes along you take the card and put it in the new phone and your new phone then assumes your account identity from the card.

The iPhone also has a browser for surfing the web. This is something you can already do by using Opera Mini and you do not need a $500 high-end phone to do it. Most people don’t spend a lot of time surfing the web with their phone but that is changing. Opera Mini already has millions of users and the hype of the iPhone will probably boost mini users even more.

All in all, the iPhone sounds really good and I can’t wait to get one. Many of us are now accustomed to synching our music between our desktop or laptop and our iPod. Many of us also sync between a handheld device and our computer. In theory, the iPod will mean syncing with just one device. I would say Apple has just raised the bar in a major way.

Epilogue: The new Apple TV sounds pretty good also. More on that later.