Re: Dedicated Z-wave sites?

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's no problem if the IP stacks in a light switch couldn't do media. That's
not a problem. It's just important that the light switches could be on the
same ethernet data backbone as the rest of the system. The main LAN can
handle the heavy lifting. But if you could have a single data backbone for
everything, that would be optimal to me. The light switches themselves
wouldn't necessarily need to be IP based. They could still be some
proprietary wireless type of protocol to keep them cheap, but with multiple
transmitters hanging off the ethernet network. Though, if it was financially
feasible to just directly make them IP capable, there could be something
said for that.

I don't know what a good price point is. I'm not a good person to ask about
that end of it. But I assume it would need to be reasonably competitive with
Z-Wave/UPB. I think it could carry some premium because it would be a more
desirable technology and could scale up considerably higher and could have
very low latency.

And they would have to have a way to set a hard wired network address before
installing. You couldn't depend on DHCP for your lighting. So you would want
to set aside a range of addresses on your internal network and give them to
the lights so that they would have fixed addresses that could be directly
connected to even if the DHCP system was not avaliable. I don't know if that
would be some kind of non-volatile memory set by connecting to the network
and sending it some special broadcast commands, or something as simple as a
couple of physical wheels.

You don't want them to be ablet o just automagically join the network, since
that would be a security hole big enough to drive a truck through, or at
least a bicycle. They'd have to be explicitly allowed in through some sort
of enrollment mechanism. Maybe the enrollment and address assignment would
be part of the same process. You plug it into the network and press a
special button on the back and sends out a broadcast address to join. The
automation software indicates some wants to join and asks if it is ok and if
so sends it an address to set itself permanently to.

Anyway, there are plenty of details that would have to be dealt with to make
it a real world functioning product, but it's also not rocket science
either.

---------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd
www.charmedquark.com
"Dave Houston" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:45816e31.39601765@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> What price point do you think is necessary for a network node that could
> do
> what you want?
>
> Microchip has recently introduced a family of chips which combine their
> ENC28J60 ethernet interface with some of their most powerful
> microcontrollers. They sell for under $10 even in low volume but they are
> only 10Mbps. Perhaps future versions will be faster.
>
> http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1335&dDocName=en026439
>
> Even if they cannot do media, they are likely to have a place in ethernet
> appliances.
>
> http://davehouston.net
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/roZetta/
> roZetta-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx