Technology

Dammit... just lost a whole post about technology, so I guess I'll have to write the whole damn thing all over again.

The emphasis of Smart Home Hacks was X10 technology. X10 technology utilizes the existing electrical wiring in your home to send information, so in theory, you can turn your lights off from across the room, or even across the house.

So why haven't I heard about any of this before?!?!? This, in my opinion, is the biggest failing of the home automation industry: a complete lack of publicity. Apparently, X10 technology has been around since the late 70's (ironically, so have I). It was supposedly built into houses in the 80's and 90's, but due to unreliability, never got used and eventually fell into disuse by all but hobbyists and geeks (like me).

The two main sources of unreliability in most X10 systems (or so I've read) are:
1) phased wiring: Our electricity circuits in the house are 110V (and you know this very well if you've ever tried to plug in a European camera). What I didn't know is that it's only the internal wiring that's 110V. Apparently, the power lines that feed my house are 220V, and when it gets to my house, that's split into 2 - 110V lines (phases). If you have a module plugged into one phase that wants to send a signal to the other phase, the signal has to exit your house and cross the 220V line to the other phase before it comes back in your house and (hopefully) reaches its destination. This unreliability is supposedly solved by improved hardware and the use of bridges/couplers (to bridge the phase gap) and amplifiers/repeaters (to boost the X10 signal).

2) electrical noise: A lot of modern technology (desktop computers, laptop computers, home A/V equipment) as well some older (blenders!) tend to leak noise onto your electrical wiring. This can corrupt X10 signals on the line, and even confuse your modules (turning your lights on randomly!). Furthermore, some newer power strips (like mine!) filter out the X10 signals because they think it's electrical noise, and thus, the signal never progresses beyond the powe strip. Both of these problems are supposedly solved by improved hardware (again) and the use of filters which block the noise from your appliances as well as prevent the X10 signal from reaching the power strip which dampens the signal.

One of the companies that offers "improved" hardware (or so advertised) is SmartHome (http://www.smarthome.com). And once you go there, you will inevitably find their Insteon products (http://www.smarthome.com/prodindex.asp?catid=74 or http://www.insteon.com). From my research (again, I'm new to this!), Insteon is kind of the big brother of X10. With its products just reaching the market first in 2005, Insteon also sends signals (albeit larger ones than X10) across your electircal wires and is backward compatible with X10 products. Furthermore, Insteon gets rid of X10's traditional unreliability points by making every Insteon module also a repeater (to replace repeaters/amplifiers) and utilizing RF technology to bridge the phase gap (to replace couplers/bridges). They advertise that Insteon's RF technology makes the whole network more reliable by broadcasting signals over both the wiring network and the RF network, but I have yet to see any Insteon product take advantage of the RF technology other than for bridging the phase gap.

There are other technologies that have come and gone, but X10 appears to have been the most widely used and popular, and Insteon appears to be the movement of the future. They supposedly work OK together (I hesitate to say the work well without actually trying them), but I couldn't find anyone else on the internet who has documented how to use them together very well, so I decided to build my own hybrid X10/Insteon home automation system, and keep track of it on this blog. I decided to use Insteon in addition to standard X10 in part because I'm hoping that modules that are available for X10 but presently unavailable for Insteon (web cams, motion sensors, in-wall outlets) will be available soon, and hopefully soon enough that I won't even have to upgrade, I can buy them straight out before I get to that phase of my installation. After making that decision, there was much more research to do as to what I wanted to do, and how to do it.