Re: Searching for a easy communication home automation system

["Florent Clairambault" <Florent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for your answer

> As I noted in my response to your email, I don't think Insteon is
> available
> yet for 230V/50Hz so you will likely need to concentrate on other systems.

We could use it with a 230V to 120V converter. It's a school school project,
so if we can't use it our home, it's not really a problem. And Insteon is
supposed to come in Europe, at the end of 2007 / beginning of 2008.

> Unless things have changed, Zensys wants a lot of money for their Z-Wave
> SDK. I'm not a fan of Z-Wave but there may be others here who can help.

Yes, it's too expansive. But as I said, it's a school project, we won't sell
it, so we don't really care about copyrights. If we can find a serial
controller and a way to use it, that would be great.

> There are Zigbee home automation devices but there are also some patent
> suits filed by Lutron against both Control4 (Zigbee based) and Leviton
> (Z-Wave based). You probably should avoid both until the lawsuits play
> out.

I could'nt find any of them. Can you give me a website where to find them ?
We are not really interested by ZigBee, but our school has a license, some
chips and lots of projects have already been made on it (but few were really
working).

> Have you considered C-Bus. It's an RS485 based system with some wireless
> (RF) subsystems. It is available for 230V/50Hz and 120V/60Hz systems and
> has
> a serial interface available. It's more costly than the others.

I have a bad feeling about C-Bus. I think it's too high level protocol. That
means that it will be more expansive. A very simple protocol might be better
for this project.

Florent

> "Florent Clairambault" <Florent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>    We are a student team of an ingineering school. We would like to build
>> a
>>home automation system controlled by GSM. We know how to use and program
>>the
>>GSM chip.
>>
>>    We don't want to use X.10 as it really looks crappy (the main problem
>> is
>>no error detection and no retransmission). But we are pretty interested by
>>Insteon and Z-Wave.
>>
>>    Do you know any system on which one we could easily use a serial
>>connection to use it ? We are pretty interested by Insteon and the 2414S
>>controller ( http://www.smarthome.com/2414s.html ) but we don't know we
>>would be able to communicate with it. Z-Wave also seems good, but we don't
>>have any idea on how to communicate with a Z-Wave serial controller.
>>
>>    Our school can help us to use ZigBee, but it seems that there isn't
>> any
>>ZigBee product for home automation. And it seems to me it's too high level
>>protocol (compared to the Z-Wave & Insteon protocols which seem really
>>easy
>>to implement and low cost chip).
>>
>>So if we have any clue, we are really intered.
>>
>>Florent Clairambault
>>
>>Florent (at) Clairambault <DOT> fr
>>
>