Steven Trovato wrote:
> Check out www.smarthome.com. You'll see quite a selection of devices
> and technologies.
For what it's worth, I've done a fair bit with the X10 stuff over the
years, our house now has a Lutron Homeworks setup in it which is a
(maybe too expensive) centralized control system that lets you do some
things X10 can't, but makes other things that are trivial with X10 quite
expensive and difficult. One of my projects-I've-never-quite-gotten-to
is to write a protocol-bridge to propagate commands from HWI to X10 and
vice versa.
X10 is quite useful and quite functional, the cheap-and-simple
zero-crossing signaling it uses on the AC wiring greatly limits the
amount and speed of data that can be put across the wire so there's a
lot of delay in the thing which some find bothersome.
There's also issues having to do with being able to assume (or determine
whether) devices are in a particular state. All of this matters little
if all you're trying to do is remote switching; the more you want to do
and the more you want to integrate the more limiting it gets. Some
older house wiring will have trouble routing X10 (and maybe any
powerline-carrier) signals, or at least routing it across opposite legs
of the 220V feed, without some add-on circuitry.
Some X10 stuff is quite good, some is quite junky, depending on vendor
and intended market.
I'm not much acquainted with any of the X10-related RF stuff, and I've
had only a little experience with some of the newer powerline-carrier
stuff.
John.
_______________________________________________
Support Team.Net http://www.team.net/donate.html
Shop-talk mailing list
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/shop-talk
http://www.team.net/archive
|