Catching Up On Hardware News

Catching up on some hardware news from the last couple of months. With the release of Windows 7 there's been a bunch of updates to low-cost Atom-based hardware units, all of which look attractive as an entry-point to host OpenRemote Boss at your home, among other things.

The hardware at E300 price level is now coming with a dual-core Atom and NVIDIA ION graphics processors. With the entry of NVIDIA to low-end market, the units can now reportedly handle 1080 resolution high-definition content with ease (something that was too much to ask from the previous generation a year ago) and HDMI connectivity comes as a standard. DVD drives are becoming part of the hardware configuration as well, see for example the latest Eee Box model at Engadget.

Of course for people like us who like to hack things together, the interesting bit is these are generic PC's and you can easily install additional software as you please on them. They can be used for multiple purposes at home, so generic does have an added value here, although the out-of-the-factory experience requires some extra skills to set things up.

I was also browsing through the Taiwan retail store and noticed that the previous Eee Box model (B202) now retails at around $155 (USD). In about one year, the price has halved. Will be interesting to see if the same evolution occurs on the current models by the time we get to end of 2010.

The other relevant observation here is that the Eee B202 had plenty enough of resources to run home automation controller, Java or even low-end middleware server. That hardware is now selling at around $150. The price is less than for many peripheral "dumb" units that you need in a HA deployment that handle your IP to infrared or serial or other protocol translations. It now costs more to buy a mere IP gateway to KNX than it costs to buy the hardware to run full HA controller with web user interfaces, rule engines, and all.

Funny, isn't it?

To me the trend here is clear. It is going to be increasingly difficult to argue for the development cost of "specialized" home automation controller units. Don't get me wrong, I still see value in a pre-installed, out-of-the-box, plug-it-in-the-wall controller unit but the price of these units must be comparable to the hardware prices which are being driven down by the fiercely competing PC industry, with Intel pushing towards the low-end with their Atom product-line and ARM pushing up towards the smart Internet device market with their low-cost, low-energy architecture.

HA business models based on pure hardware sales margins are getting squeezed and harder to defend.

So good and interesting news all around. By the way, if a pre-built pre-installed OpenRemote Box (ORB) is something that you'd be interested in, we'd like to hear from you. If we can get enough interest, we might put some boxes together to save you from the installation exercise. So let us know if you're interested.

– Juha