Reading the threads on the forums. Larry Augustin started a thread by asking how does one do whole home automation today. Larry is an avid AV user. I wanted to summarize some of the points from some discussions that are going on.

Where to start. The professional point out that if you have the ability to wire everything low-voltage, you should. Tres mentions that retrofitting a room is not that expensive and that room automation should be done with cabling in place specifically for AV. Sheet-rocking over low-voltage wiring is a good and relatively cheap way to upgrade. Ben points out that devices like the TV do not move much and so should be cabled anyway. This way you can start accessing Media Centers from your TV.

Neil points out that a POD (reference implementation) in fact is a bridge between a room and the Wifi IP network. So you could have one of those little boxes sitting next to your TV or in the panel Talking IP to your TV via Ethernet.

The POD is in fact an RF antenna (difficult to source still, according to Mark Spencer). Larry Augustin points out that he runs a unique SSID over a mesh of WIFI access points. Could the PODS be used as robust repeaters?

As for me, I don't watch TV but A clearer picture of the spine of the house emerges. It is a Wifi skeleton with physical nervous endpoints that map to IR/RS/Ethernet/proprietary wire protocols. The mesh of pods should work on ONE SSID. The end-points are rooms. It seems that cabling a room for low-voltage is both affordable, effective and actually quite a nice upgrade. So treat yourself.

Then Larry gets all competitive and brags about needing a 2000ft run of cables, which leaves most of the guys here kind of stunned until someone pipes up: you mean to tell us you have a 20kft house?. He he.

After spending some quality time reading and learning about the field, there are few trends that I believe are reshaping this industry.

1/ Wireless technologies reach mass market. The advent of Wifi and the lowering of price point for hardware promises to deliver IP on everything. Of course we are far away from this, and it may never be everywhere (IP on every switch?). Retrofitting houses is an expensive proposition. Wireless distribution is already a standard in the industry with all major vendors supporting one form of RF or another. At OpenRemote you will see that the controller specs call for Wireless wifi. Our architecture is IP to Physical media (Infrared, Serial, high-voltage etc)

2/ Commodity Hardware, Commodity Software. Look at our Reference Implementation. It is a $250 unit. It is a PC really, fanless, solid state, good CPU. It is powerful enough to run a high-end controller without a hitch. The open source movement, from which a lot of us come, has delivered a wealth of tools and frameworks one can use for free to develop powerful software applications. At OpenRemote our OR Controller runs on Java on Linux, all leveraging Open Source tools. Our modular design enables us to support many protocols, including the proprietary ones.

3/ The iPhone. The iPhone/iTouch are neat little programmable touch panels. They are generic and touch driven. A lot of folks are already leveraging this platform to deliver new UI experiences that complement the current physical panel approach. The iPhone as a universal remote for home automation makes a lot of sense.

4/ The real estate crisis. Domotics today is mostly a rich man's game. It is possible that the high end field be immune to the effects of this real-estate downturn with very high end construction always needing the likes of Crestron and Lutron. For most people however new construction is not effective and a lot of people will stay put. That means a booming market for retrofit and upgrades, where wireless, commodity and iPhone driven solutions will explode. This means an expansion of demand for efficient integration. Training the installers and programmers will, by transitivity, be a good business model and one we intend to explore at OpenRemote.

Point 1/2/3 outline a democratization of home automation, 4 means the economic climate may provide the push for the field to expand during the contraction. It is counter-intuitive. It is a fun time to be in this industry.

Domotics will be a mass-market by 2020.

In talking with Ben via IM the other day, something became clear: the state of RS programming is a joke in the home-tech industry. Basically you got to buy the documentation, they print HEX codes at the back and you can program your interface. Which is pretty cool when you think about it, but sounds a bit ante-diluvian for the Internet generation, you want to program your home, here figure it out.

The promise of holding all these codes in a centralized database, like LIRC has compiled a flat file of 10,000 devices over time in IR land, with all the commodities associated to the Internet enabling of these devices. For example you would now need a query UI in front of this database where we can retrieve the codes for you under the productID and ship it to you, to your iPhone, to the hardware programmable interface Ben is dreaming about.

To the best of our knowledge there is no such effort today? if there isn't then starting one is certainly a good investment of our time, a valid contribution to the field.

We want to broadcast that if you have ever played with HEX codes on your remote device, we want to talk to you! No seriously! we want to have an automated web UI that can capture the information that is out there and collect it in a central beehive of codes. Call it the beehive. License the database under CC, have them retain copyright, assign us rights to negotiate the CC license on their behalf or this thing will get too complicated.

This is solid PR by the way, we wouldn't be wasting anybody's time, this helps everyone and should be a good to say we are serious about helping where we can with the experience we have. Project Beehive automated data-collection. Certifying such a collection (like CB is working on LIRC cleansing) would be a valuable service. Very close to the JBoss model in a way. But different. Yeah, i could get excited about that!

I am about to sign a contract with PageONE PR (Chantal Yang from the JBoss days).

Why a PR agency this early you may ask? What is a PR agency you may ask? (A PR agency is like an IR agency but it does PR, he he).

Clearly this is not news driven, we do not have a product (yet), no news release or the usual event that warrant PR, It is a small contract, for four month to help us announce the OSS group and raise its visibility. Our core little group is fairly active, not to mention talented, and I believe we will benefit by opening up the design discussion early on. The more the merrier. Raising awareness is a good thing for a young OSS group, its lifeblood really.

In talking with everyone, the one thing that strikes me is the high level of enthusiasm around the idea of an open community that starts afresh. Clearly there are other efforts but we all feel we can bring something new to the table. I recognize that spark. I want it to grow. And fast. I want a grass roots efforts that attracts the best individual, enthusiast talent out there. If it is out there, they need to hear about us! The industry is ripe for such an effort of open standardization, open platform and open community. If it isn't OpenRemote it will be something else, we might as well throw our hats in the ring! We need to grow organically and organize what talent is out there. We may see a flood of visitors or we may hear crickets. I am intrigued by the number of guests that our online ticker displays... we need them to participate.

This will be a low-key PR effort (I PROMISE NO CAPS NEIL :), mostly blogs, high touch reach out to friends, alpha-geeks, a few journalists. It is too early to go industry press we would be laughed at or worse ignored. This is a we are coming message but mostly a we are open message. We want to create a open community, around open standards and deliver kick ass software and hardware. Why? huh because we want it that way and mostly for the fun of it right now.

Your thoughts and ideas on the message are welcome, please pitch in how you would position the group to garner initial interest. I will share my own ideas with you when I am ready but if I can ask you to comment with top 3 traits you can think of why people should check us out and consider joining the group, please post them. No need to over do it, just the top 3 will be plenty enough.

Target date mid-july. We have a lot of work to do on the website before we get there.

I finally got some time to read through the 68 pages of technical details that come in a PDF from Insteon (found from wikipedia, just go and look there).

Here is what comes out on top for me:

IT IS A PHYSICAL LAYER NETWORKING PROTOCOL THAT ACHIEVES ALL HOUSE NETWORKING THROUGH POWERLINES. Non-IP, mesh oriented, fire-and-forget semantics.

Advantages is that it is a mesh protocol. What that means is that the network grows in strength with the number of participants. It builds itself out with every item you put in. The downside is that it is a mesh protocol and NOT an IP protocol. The fire and forget means it is mostly stateless (IP would solve that in a jiffy)

The way it works physically is actually pretty neat, I mean from a physics standpoint. 10 years of theoretical physics had to serve me one day even if at a trivial level. Think FM vs AM (Frequency modulation vs Amplitude modulation). The problem with AM (X10?) is that amplitude noise will trick your house into turning ALL the lights on when lightning strikes. The beauty of FM is that it works on the frequency modulation and therefore is orthogonal to amplitude, very robust. Not only that, but they require that several cycles be detected to compute a 1 signal. Finally, because it is really a digital packet oriented approach, error correction algorythms in the form of CRC checks are standard and will trigger retransmit. NICE! digital correction on top of a robust physical layer. This is where INSTEON gets its good rep for reliability and speed.

One downside is obvious and stems from its strength. Because it is digital FM on wires, it has to be very close to the actual current going through the wires. For example in the US it locks onto the 60Hz and the 2 phases. In France it is 3 phases, in Germany I don't know what it is, but is has got to be square and in Italy, it is what it is depending on the time of the day. Clearly the EU market is fragmented at a tech level and must be hard for them to address. The numbers may simply not make sense.

Whatever the case may INSTEON is not addressing the EU market and X10 being the default crap there. But nit-picks aside. Insteon sounds like a really cool DEFACTO standard for power line communication of devices and mesh networking throughout the house.

Oh and by the way: 2KB/s sustained is good. Good enough to say you freaking light! turn on already!. Not good for video, but that is not what we are doing here.

I suspect it may be even good to transmit commands we would otherwise transmit by WIFI. Has anybody encapsulated a IP protocol in the 8 Bytes of user data the damn protocol offers? If you are following me here, it precludes the POD design!!!