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.
IPv6 should be in every light switch, socket, light bulb, and so on. It's already doable: http://www.picotux.com/producte.html or http://www.gumstix.com/spexBundles.html - give this another 3-5 years to get to $10 for a light switch. I think everyone who is planning long-term for anything else is on the wrong track. Similar to how (look up Google Gears) is completely besides the point: In 5 years there is no anymore, nobody will touch a computing device that is not connected to other devices/services. Ask yourself, when was the last time you used a computer without an internet connection and then didn't put it away after 5 minutes?
I don't remember ever using a computer without the internet.
You could be right about IPv6
Kids! ;-)
I remember using keyboards with just shift, control (they were the reverse of the IBM PC layout) and the normal ASCII keys. We had to know our control sequences.
Uh, no way! IPV6 requires a lot of processor power, ram and rom. I don't think you'll see it on anything less than 32 bits. This is still too expensive for a wall switch.
Author: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies