Turning your house or apartment into a smart home involves acquiring and setting up a variety of new devices. In this second installment of our Home Automation series, we examine the different types of products and devices that can be used to automate your home. We’ve mentioned previously that you can set up some basic automation with independent devices like occupancy-sensing switches and lamp timers, but let’s ignore these for now. In this article we’ll focus specifically on integrated home control solutions comprising products that are designed to work together throughout your home.
Building Blocks
For the purposes of understanding home technology, you can think of most smart home components as falling into four groups: devices, controllers, interfaces, and systems. This is by no means an official industry classification, but it’s a helpful way of thinking about what you might need to acquire to automate your home.
The components of a home automation solution essentially create an independent network in your home, communicating with each other through wired or wireless signals. By far, the most common smart home components are devices and controllers. Smart home devices are typically electrical or electronic components—lights, appliances, fans, locks, etc.—that can be controlled remotely. They’re designed specifically to receive signals and react to them accordingly by turning on, dimming, opening, or performing some other useful function. Conversely, controllers let you control these smart devices; they send signals to your devices to trigger various functions. Controllers come in many forms, including switches, keypads, touchscreens, and remotes.
You can build a robust automation network with just smart home devices and controllers, but for a solution that integrates even more household devices, you might also want to look into smart home interfaces and systems. Intefaces create a bridge between your smart home network and other household systems like security systems, draperies, and irrigation systems. And for the greatest control and opportunity to tailor your smart home to your lifestyle and habits, you may want to consider a smart home system. A smart home system is typically computer hardware or software that monitors environmental, electrical, and other inputs and activity around your home, and then consequently controls your home’s devices and systems based on those inputs. Automation systems can range dramatically in size and cost from custom-installed and configured servers to freely-available software for your computer. Smart home systems have the added advantage of providing the greatest control over other household systems through a diverse set of interfaces.
Standards and Protocols
When you start researching home automation, you’ll soon learn that there are numerous products in the market, and many of them are incompatible with each other. Home automation networks function using a variety of different protocols, or communication standards. When you start to build your own automation network, you’ll need to ensure that all of your components can work together.
The best way to ensure compatibility is to look for products from the same manufacturer, but that may not always be possible. Pay particular attention to the protocol(s) supported by different products. Some common protocols include X10, UPB, Z-Wave, ZigBee, and INSTEON. Products using the same protocol are often compatible with each other and can be used together as part of the same home automation network. While some systems allow you to integrate products using different protocols, you’ll usually get the best performance and reliability by picking a protocol and sticking with it.
Wired, Wireless, and Mesh
Smart home products can be installed in any home—you don’t have to build your own house or buy a newer home to get started. Just install and configure some smart home devices and controllers that use the same protocol, and you’ve created an independent automation network in your home. Many smart home networks use your existing electrical wiring or wireless radio wave communications to send and receive signals necessary to control devices and report status. Both approaches have their plusses and minuses. Newer systems establish a dynamic mesh network between installed devices or use a combination of both wired and wireless communications for extended range and greater reliability.
Getting Started
If you’re thinking about automating your home or even just dabbling with some smart home products, spend some time thinking about what you want to accomplish. Do some research to find out who manufactures and sells the types of devices you want before choosing a protocol. If you’re just controlling a few lamps around the house, X10 may be a better solution than a complex ZigBee-compatible system like Control 4. If you want everything from motion-sensing driveway lighting to whole-home distributed media and occupancy-triggered HVAC control, you may need a more complex system and interfaces like those offered by Crestron. In future installments of this series, we’ll dig more deeply into some of these options, exploring the different protocols and available devices.
I find it odd that a enthusiast site is pushing home owner over to Control 4/Crestron which are only available through dealers or back door contacts. Hopefully, you will add reviews for mcontrol (come back to life), isy-99, or Homeseer.
We’ll absolutely cover DIY system solutions in this series. We’re painting the landscape in these first few articles, which includes everything from $5.99 devices to multi-thousand-dollar, custom-install systems. And I agree—I sincerely hope Embedded Automation breathes some new life into mControl. And for that matter that we actually see HomeSeer 3 sometime this year. These companies’ core products have been stagnating for years.