Ok, I am also very interested in HA (how rare on this list ;)

What are you opinions on where should the actual
switching/sensing/monitoring
should take place? From what Ive read here most seem to think that HA
should be done by simply switching wall sockets on/off ?

I kinda think it should be done in the appliance intself, say for instance
you have a tablelamp and you want it to dim to 70% at 20.30 each day.
Now this can be done with a dimmed wallsocket ofcourse, but what it
you move the lamp? Then you must find out what is the ID of the new
wall socket and tell  your controller to dim that instead and reset the
previous
socket to default values. If instead the lamp had the abillities built in
it could be moved around and your settings follow it whereever you
decide to put the lamp.

The problem w adding HA to an old house is the wireing, a simpler start
might be to just add small boxes to the outlets (like those new cheap
digital
timers one just plug in) w all the smarts in them.

As for technology to transfer your signals theres a number of different
ways, all more or less good/bad
X10 slow, unreliable? and expensive (atlest here)
Extra cables with RS485, CAN, Profibus etc etc
fast, reliable, fairly simple but messy to add to an existing house.

Radio is the way I am considering. A small trancivercard that can be
built in where its possible and in some places (like the garage that hasn't
wires built in in the wall) can fairly easy be rewired to a central
switchbox
that control a group of lamps and outlets and door, motions sensors etc

And if you add a bridge between you radio-HA-lan and your ethernet lan
you can control it from whereever u want...

Just my $0.05 (inflation)



----- Original Message -----
> I want to ask. Out of all the replies it seemed that CAN is a good
> "Network" to do this on, but out of the list and from of my searches via
> Google, RS485 also seems to very widely used for this type of
> application.
>
> Can you guys give me some feedback on witch is the better, easier, more
> functional, more reliable technology to go and invest my time in?
>
> Thanks
> Ruben

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body