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Is Insteon Better than X10 for Home Automation?
Paul Carver writes "Smarthome has been advertising Insteon for a while now, but I haven't bought any of it, yet. I've accumulated a fair amount of X10 products over the years, including Smarthome branded signal boosters, signal couplers, noise blockers, and troubleshooting tools. Even so, I'm pretty much fed up with X10. Nothing I've bought has succeeded in making my X10 system more than 'just barely acceptable' and 'better than nothing but not by much'. A Google search for Insteon doesn't turn up much other than their own advertisements and a couple of vaguely positive but not detailed reviews. Is this new technology going to take off? What's the community's consensus on home automation?"
I would like to improve the automation of my home. I have some vague images of the "Home of the Future" from early cartoons and discussions with friends. Some people worry about gender role changes and social impacts: http://askpang.typepad.com/relevant_history/2003/0 7/home_of_the_fut.html
http://samvak.tripod.com/home.html
Others just want better technology. For me it is really about common communication standards, even [gasp] network aware appliances. Leaning on communication over the power lines to achieve low-quality control with limited feedback is not good enough for me to adopt. My brother-in-law loves X10 though and suggests that wider usage will result in improvements that will bridge the gap. I am not convinced however. Ultimately for me its about what I can control and see from my office, but I am just a hopeless geek...
hmm... so basically this is saying that virtually never is about 1 in about 3300. (or 3 in 10000, however you want to look at it) now if you turn on ten things a day (which seems reasonable if not conservative) then at least once a year your house will do something crazy.
now for something innocuous like lights, i turn on lights all teh time and it sometimes doesnt work (ie it burns out) but if I am away on vacation and insteon decides to turn on my AC full blast in the middle of summer for a week, well then that would suck.
How hard is it to guarantee packet delivery, and to make the hardware not do something stupid if it gets an error?
I had a long discussion with Smarthome about the license you MUST agree to in order to purchase their Insteon SDK, which includes nondisclosure terms as well as requiring you to get their permission before distributing anything. And other hostile legal stuff. The person I was discussing this started off trying to be helpful and then did a 180 and gave me a bunch of corporate doublespeak BS that clearly indicated that they weren't going to change anything.
Smarthome has in the past been friendly to free software developers, but with Insteon, they are hostile. Because, you know, X10 was popularized by commercial software folks, not those silly hobbyists.
There are several different companies with their own ideas as to how to replace X10. One good example is the Universal Powerline Bus, which is documented enough to write software. The problem with ALL of the X10 replacement ideas is that they're different. The reason I have X10 is because I can get cool dimmers and a USB interface from Smarthome, a repeater/bridge and wire-in switched outlets from Leviton, and cheap wall wart modules from X10.com. I have a lot of products to choose from, and different vendors selling similar products and price competition. None of the X10 replacement proposals are really and truly open, they're all really proprietary, but their vendor will happily take royalties from everyone else.
Until this situation changes, and the major vendors band together, make something truly open, and all unify behind it, we're stuck with X10.
X10 is mostly useless today.
1) X10 doesn't work with modern wiring.
It started degrading 10+ years ago, when building wiring improved and circuits and outlets started becoming more isolated. I've seen homes built as much as 20 years ago where the X10 signal only propogates from the upper outlet to the lower one, not to any other outlet. Plus, it never worked on surge protectors.
2) The workarounds are worse
Current X10 solutions get around this by having a wired-to-wireless bridge. This complication adds to the expense and defeats the entire purpose of having the electrical wiring propogate the signal. We need an all wireless solution.
3) X10 is too limited
X10 is limited to on/off/up/down. For example, you can't fade-up the lights on a home theater room if they were turned off. They first must "pop" to full brightness then fade down. There are complicated ways around this, but they really isn't worth it.
Now, with all that said, I've not seen the alternatives. But I imagine anythnig would be better.
You can control your lighting and heating without getting out of bed.
You can turn the outside lights on at sunset and off at sunrise.
You can "gang" all the lights in your room together so that the main
switch by the door turns everything on and off.
If you are hacking at your computer and have your head phones on so you
can't hear the door bell, you can have your house tell your computer to
pop up a message on your screen. If you don't want to wait for someone
to ring the door bell (i.e., UPS) you can put in a motion sensor to do
the same thing.
I'm not sure what you think astroturfing means, but I'm just a person who has wasted too much money on an unreliable X10 home automation system. I haven't bought any Insteon stuff and I said so. Home automation certainly seems to me like a topic where Slashdot readers will have a fair amount of experience and knowlegeable opinions about what works and what doesn't.
If you've got something specific against Insteon I'd love to hear it so I don't waste my money. If you've got nothing of value to add to the conversation though . . .
Nope. No motion detectors at all. The probelm is that the protocol has no error checking. There are no CRC's, ACK's, or retransmits or anything. It's just a very very simplistic crappy 30 year old protocol that does not handle real world conditions well. It needs to die.
I've been using X10 for years. I've really liked it in some houses, have hated it in others (like my current house - doesn't work worth jack, and I haven't spent the time and money to get it working as of yet).
It looks like this new tech (Insteon) also mostly broadcasts over the power lines.
I have a question about this... in today's (often) wireless homes, WHY aren't there power control devices that work like X10, that just use a straight 802.11 wireless network? I have complete, strong, coverage in every part of my house. A wireless router is pretty cheap, and I would imagine that most people that use this type of tech will likely have one. It sure seems like this would work... could do bi-directional comm. Create a common standard (web services on the device maybe??). Is this just a cost and space issue? Shoving a wirelss device with a light computer built in? I'd personally be willing to pay a fair amount for something like this, if it worked 100%.
Anyway. I'll be very interested in seeing what other tech others point out - I'd love to get back to a house that was doing some like X10 for all lights/switches/etc., that was reliable (and just WORKED, on my wiring!)
Has anyone integrated any good home automation SW with the Asterisk PBX?
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make install -not war
.....After waking up in the middle of the night to find every light in the house on (twice) when I only had X10.....
That reminds me of the time my father-in-law came down from Canada to visit us a few weeks after we were married. The lights in the room where he and mother-inlaw were staying was controlled by an X10 module. The system had actually never acted weird before, but the lights came on in the middle of the night and then went off again. A short time later the cycle repeated. In the morning he was VERY annoyed, threatening to leave immediately if not sooner. He had unscrewed the bulbs and had peace. I investigated the wall switch unit and it seemed to work normally. However, just to be safe, I replaced it and took the offending suspect apart. What had happened was that an ant had bridged the thyristor gate terminal. In the night, when the Bay Area air gets a little damp, the electrocuted ant body absorbed enough moisture to trigger the lights on. The current dried out the ant and the lights would then go off again. After some time, the cycle would repeat! The most annoying feature of the x-10 dimmers is the fact that a power glitch would turn the lights off and they'd stay off. I wonder if the Insteon units also suffer from this shortcoming. X-10 units often fail to respond, but don't switch on or off by themselves usually.
All theory is gray