Hi Patrick

I am busy with a brand spanking new house. I am laying the foundations
beginning of next month, so I am including the necessary wiring
infrastructure everywhere.

The problem with Radio is the cost involved. I think (Speculate) that
even Ethernet will be cheaper.

So with your lamp example, I will have the infrastructure, at every
plug, necessary to move any automation (Light Dimmer) with the lamp and
just plug it in.

I do understand that with an older house is a bit of a problem to
rewire!

Lyle sent out a mail to create a DL list for HA, if you are interested.

Ruben


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick J [mailto:info@DATECH.SE]
Sent: 09 June 2003 14:10
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [PIC]: Home Automation with PICs

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

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