Electronic chatter: appliances get smart

Custom Home, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Rebecca Day

Out in Irvine, Calif., the folks at Smarthome see the networked home in two ways: gadgets that deliver entertainment on one side and appliances that can be controlled on the other. The first group--the networks for sharing Internet access, the audio servers that stream music throughout a house, the video cameras that can be viewed from any TV--gets a lot of press. They're the cool gizmos that deliver the music, video, and mind-numbing games we crave during downtime.

The other products are utilitarian and exist largely alone. The washing machine in the laundry room, the refrigerator in the kitchen and the lamps and light switches throughout the house are integral to our everyday comfort but are generally pretty dumb.

Smarthome, a home automation company, wants to give the latter group, as one might suspect, some smarts. Using recently developed technology called Insteon the refrigerator could dispatch an SOS to a service technician when its compressor is on the fritz. The clothes dryer could send a message to the homeowner's Pocket PC when the lint cleaner needs a swipe. The microwave oven could call Pillsbury to find out just how long the brownies should be in the oven and automatically start cooking when it gets a reply.

If all this electronic chitchat sounds vaguely familiar, it was the kind of techno-babble flashy upstart companies promised during the bubble years of the dot-com era. Your refrigerator would detect when you were low on milk and call Kozmo for a morning delivery. But Kozmo and a few of its counterparts caved, and the Internet appliance was predicated on every home having a Cat 5 pipeline and Ethernet connection to the kitchen. Down the road the scenario might still come to pass (with Cat 15 wire by then), but that day could be a long way off, and appliance makers haven't seen the need to build additional component costs into their wares while the world waits for the intelligent dishwasher.

The folks at Smarthome think they can hasten the arrival of affordable and complete home automation. Founded in 1992 as Home Automation Systems, Smarthome supplies home control products to do-it-yourselfers. The company has built its business on the power-line-based X-10 protocol, offering low-cost solutions for security, lighting, and appliances. But X-10, a 30-year-old technology created first as a means to control turntables and then to control lights, has well-documented limitations. Having studied both the strengths and weaknesses of X-10, Smarthome now wants to take power-line control to the next level.

"X-10's main weakness is reliability," says Dan Creeg, vice president of engineering for Smarthome. "People who put X-10 in their homes became disenchanted with the reliability when they tried to add more nodes," he says. X-10 is especially poor at controlling products such as ranges, water heaters, and HVAC systems, which operate at 240 volts. Smarthome says its Insteon communications protocol can couple the phases of a home's electrical system to make control of those high-drain appliances more reliable. Insteon also provides feedback. A command is retransmitted until a confirmation is received, something X-10 couldn't do. Insteon also adds wireless radio-frequency (RF) control with signals that are synchronized with those going out over the power line. Smarthome says Insteon is the only dual-band technology for home control.

Like X-10, Insteon carries control commands over the power line and is also backward compatible with X-10 devices. A basic installation requires two access point modules that plug into the wall, and those access modules carry both power line and RF commands. "We create a mesh network," says Ken Fairbanks, director of sales. "The signal between any two devices can reach the device either exclusively over the power line, exclusively over RF, or through a combination of power line and RF."

A typical installation would use the RF component of Insteon for hand-held control devices such as Palm organizers, Pocket PCs, or dedicated remote controls. A wireless motion detector might be used in a place where a wire can't run to a door or window. When the wireless sensor sends out a command to the alarm box that motion was detected, it waits for confirmation that the signal was received. If there's no acknowledgment, it continues to send until it is received--in split-second increments. The re-transmission inherent in the design overcomes any noise that can interfere with communication between devices, the company says.

Lighting modules, on the other hand, including wall switches that require a metal shielded box and are subject to variations in temperature, would operate over the Insteon power-line network, along with white goods whose metal construction blocks RF transmission.

Insteon plans to have its first 12 lighting and appliance control modules in the market in first quarter 2005. The $20 lighting modules will enable homeowners to control and set lighting scenes. PC interfaces will allow control and scheduling from the computer. The company's ambitious goal is to create an industry standard much in the way X-10 did, and it is pitching the technology to manufacturers in various industries in the hopes products will come out of the box with Insteon inside. The company released the Insteon spec in late spring hoping to climb aboard manufacturer development cycles which can run several years ahead.