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A Protocol For Home Automation
jfruh writes "Marshall Rose, one of the creators of the SNMP protocol, has a beef with current home automation gadgets: it's very, very difficult to get them to talk to each other, and you often end up needing a pile of remote controls to operate them. To fix these problems, he's proposed the Thing System, which will serve as an intermediary on your home automation network. The Thing System aims to help integrate gadgets already on the market, which may help it take off."
There are already a few home automation hubs (if I understand what he is suggesting correctly), such as Pytomation.
The main challenge is as far as I can see there is yet a single protocol to bind them all, and even then it would be yet another protocol. For this reason, there have been attempts to create protocol exchanges (not sure the right term), that act as central system that can speak to different sensors and control systems using the specific protocols.
Its not clear what he is offering that existing solutions fail at? It doesn't help that the site doesn't sum things up in one paragraph and instead requires us to parse the whole presentation before understanding what he really is proposing.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This is someone who was ok with ASN.1, OID's, and "walking" tables that had no business in being walked, over an unreliable UDP protocol that initially had effectively zero security.
Someone stop him from developing a home automation protocol before his being "first" relegates that industry to 30 years of pain and suffering.