Controlling The Home

Dec. 11, 2008

Multimedia is already part of home-automation systems. Take, for instance, Control4’s range of products from lighting and climate control to switched audio. Wallmount LCD panels provide a convenient portal to an array of controllable

William G. Wong

Home-automation system installers typically handle this class of product. In the past, these systems were wired point-to-point solutions. The movement to networked and wireless solutions will make installation easier in addition to opening it up to do-it-yourselfers.

Emerging standards will facilitate this process. For example, a range of ZigBee Pro profiles from the ZigBee Alliance targets the home, including the Lighting Profile and Home Automation Profile. These will allow third-party products to work together. Currently, most home-automation products are designed to work with a specific system.

Home-automation systems already have a video source—security and surveillance cameras—that can be integrated into home media systems.

Of course, integrators and installers will be able to take advantage of standards-based products as well, because they will enlarge the number of options. It will also simplify the job of integrating a customer’s existing network with a home-automation system.

CONTROL4 • www.control4.com
ZIGBEE ALLIANCE • www.zigbee.org

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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