Home Control

Home control and home automation background.

Your home should adjust to your desires. It should wake you gently, perhaps with some favourite music, rather than with a raucous alarm. Once you start moving, it should provide a brief summary of news events during the evening, and the weather predictions. If you were out late, it should have provided the outward impression that someone had been home. When showering, it should be impossible to get burnt, and water temperatures, once set, should remain as set, and not wander randomly. If you are on the phone, the sound level of your TV or sound system should be muted. If watching TV, outside light should be excluded.

Unfortunately, very little of this effort seems to have reached us in Australia.

X-10 devices are virtually unknown in Australia, as are Echelon's LonWorks. Clipsal has Minder and C-Bus (which not the same as the international effort to make a power line interface called CEBus). The proposed Shared Wireless Access protocol from the Home Radio Frequency Working Group doesn't seem to have any impact either.

Other proposed wired home technologies I've heard of include HomePNA (Home Phoneline Network Alliance), HomeRF, HAPI, HAVi, UPnP (Universal Plug n Play), SUN's Jini, CEBus, LonWorks and probably a few others, and who knows what all those acronyms mean. Control networks will probably go with CEBus or LonWorks.

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