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ZigBee Pro, the New Home Automation Standard?
An anonymous reader writes "Echelon, Microsoft, Intel, Sun and the Electronic Industries Alliance have been trying to create a home automation standard for two decades — to no avail. Now the ZigBee Alliance, proprietor of a low-rate two-way wireless mesh networking technology, says it will prevail. In six weeks, automation vendor Control4, which has about one million ZigBee nodes installed, will flip the switch on the new ZigBee Pro, which promises interoperability among light switches, thermostats, door locks, motorized shades, security systems, remote controls and some 36 million electric meters."
I've invested in relays and dimmers from National Control Devices and have run Cat 5e all over my apartment, even into my light switches and where I expect to put sensors in the future. It's hard-wired, hence secure and safe from interference, and speaks via simple ASCII to a serial port which available on nearly any embedded controller. The great thing about serial is that you can add a dirt cheap serial-usb or serial-ethernet interface.
I'm not really interested in a proprietary interface like Zigbee. What is needed is a HA API. That way you can write a driver for all the proprietary protocols such as this, as well as things like ProXR, Dallas 1-wire, DMX, and many more.
Some ideas for a back-end to the API can be taken from the aging Perl app Mister House. What would then be a REALLY nice addition is a MythTV module front-end so you can control the whole house via your television.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The nice thing about X-10 is that the protocol is simple and there are lots of devices that work with it, most of which are relatively inexpensive. It's also friendly to the home hobbyist, and the hacker, since you can buy interfaces that will hook up to your PC via a serial port and write your own scripts, or download free software like Misterhouse.
If I can't turn my outside lights on at sunset via a script, then turn that script into a cron job, don't even talk to me about it. I'll write the interface myself, just give me a clean API I can code to.
We hate it when Microsoft or Apple take the attitude of "No, we won't open up our API and play nice with the open source crowd. At best we will make you join our developer program and sign an NDA. At worst we won't talk to you at all."
When the home automation vendors do it, they're no better. They don't deserve our respect or our help.
(Disclosure/Insight: My company, MMB Research http://mmbresearch.com/, makes ZigBee Smart Energy hardware and software to help people integrate this kind of technology into products, and I've been involved with ZigBee for a number of years.)
A lot of commenters here seem to be comparing the various features of competing home automation technologies, which is certainly appropriate, but you also have to look at the bigger, future picture.
ZigBee - and specifically the ZigBee Smart Energy profile is becoming the standard of choice for in-home networks that will exist on the Smart Grid.
So it's one thing to compare ZigBee to Z-wave or X10 on a merits basis (though I believe it's far superior based on years of real-world experience), but when you consider your utility is going to put a ZigBee Smart Energy enabled meter/gateway in your house, and that hundreds of OEMs are going to be integrating it into wide variety of appliances that can hop on that network, you're going to see drastic reductions in cost, and increases in choice and quality.
In a few years, there might be a handful of WiFi or Z-Wave thermostats (or pool pumps, or light switches), but there will be dozens of ZigBee ones, because the installed user base will be there.
Now, Control4 is talking about ZigBee Pro and the Home Automation profile, which isn't technically part of the Smart Energy profile, but they can coexist, and many developers of Smart Energy products/solutions - including ourselves - have implemented both, opening up the HAN (home area network) to a variety of devices and controls.