Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 11:51:14 -0400 From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> To: searle@longacre.demon.co.uk Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: performance of home automation hardware Message-ID: <199908231551.LAA59899@whizzo.transsys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:34:44 BST." <19990823153444.29882@longacre.demon.co.uk> References: <19990823153444.29882@longacre.demon.co.uk>
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> What home automation hardware should I use/avoid
> if I want it to be fast and reliable?
You need to decide what it you want to control. This sounds sort
of silly on it's face, but lighting control is probably the
least interesting application of the home automation stuff I've
done. So in my case, it's served "well enough" using X10 power
line control stuff. I just make it a point to only have non-critical
functions on X10. Please don't take this the wrong way; less than 5%
of my X10 traffic doesn't work correctly, and some of that is poor
implementation rather than unreliablity of the medium. Some of it
is bugs in the computer interface implementation with back-to-back
traffic on the powerline.
> Is anything connected directly to a PC's serial
> port (etc) OK? I would assume that this would
> work, with the tiny bandwidth needed for this.
This works well for me. My 10 temperature probes and
the connection to the PBX for caller-id and call detail
records is via a serial port, as is the connection to
X10's RF remote control/mouse thing.
> According to the web page though, HCS 2 modules
> are slooow ('several seconds on large networks')
> and unreliable, reading between the lines this is
> because they continuously poll all devices on a
> 9600bps net using a Z80. (Anything connected
> directly to the controller is OK, but most modules
> don't.)
If you use their modules, but not their controller, and you
have multiple RS232->RS422 (I think) interface, you could
poll them in parallel to speed this up.
> As the X-10 stuff is also slow and unreliable for
> doing more than switching devices on and off, this
> leaves me with CEBus (if I can find anything using
> it.) This is more reliable, but how fast is it?
> Also, has anyone got URLs where I can find more info
> about CEBus and available CEBus hardware? I
> couldn't find anything relevant on web searches,
> just PC interfaces.
CEBus seems to be mostly vaporware, especially having to
do with home applications. What little I've seen is an order
of magnitude more expensive than X10.
louie
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