Re: Searching for a easy communication home automation system

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

Florent,

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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
>