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> In the 90's Bill Gates had networked house and automatically adjusting lights and it was the peak of luxury. Nonsense. X10 devices cost a bit more than regul
by pdkl95 7y ago
> In the 90's Bill Gates had networked house and automatically adjusting lights and it was the peak of luxury.
Nonsense. X10 devices cost a bit more than regular outlets/switches/fixtures, but not much more. I know many people that added dimmers/timers/remote-control to their lights for a few hundred dollars in the late-80s/90s.
Home automation has been a solved problem with cheap and easy solutions for decades.
- Nokinside 7y agoIt was way more than just the lights. He had originally something like 50 NT-servers managing his mansion. You could wear a pin that indicated your location. Light, sound system, climate would adjust to your preferences as you moved.
- pdkl95 7y agoSome of that automation might have needed servers to control, I was referring primarily to the "automatically adjusting lights", which hasn't been a luxury feature for a long time, even in Gates' house. > 50 NT-servers That was mostly Gates "eating his own dog food"[1]. Using anything other than NT could have been bad optics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoYou should read Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead"[1] from 1995 before dismissing things so readily out of hand. It's been a few years since I read it but he describes the setup in detail. It was incredibly complex even by today's standards - and this was 30 years ago! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Bill_Gates_b...
- ses1984 7y agoSolved for me, the expert, but not solved for thee, the lay person. Even if this was technically within financial reach, my personal experience was that the knowledge of how to do it was intentionally obfuscated because installers wanted to make money.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSolved for thee, the lay person. You find your local home automation company and ask them to set up a system for you. Extra benefit: the company performs a one-time service for you and you end up with products you can optionally get them (or someone else) to maintain. Contrast with IoT, where you subscribe to a service that's most likely ephemeral, will brick your devices when the service ends, and exposes you to security risks.
- ses1984 7y agoI don't know where you found such service, but I had two quotes for over 6k and 10k to get automated lighting in my house in 2009.
- cptskippy 7y agoExcept X10 devices are unsecure and can have issues with interference from neighboring homes. That's part of the reason why Insteon developed a new protocol, it mostly solves those two issues.
- pdkl95 7y agoI'm only using X10 as an example with which I have personal experience. While it did have problems, it was a decent protocol considering it was developed in the 70s. I'm sure much better alternatives exist now (or could easily be developed). The point is that lighting automation (and similar home automation features) is not a difficult problem, that doesn't need anything as powerful as a microcontroller or a dependency on the internet. A simple local-only control protocol is much more appropriate.
- cptskippy 7y agoI would disagree about the microcontroller necessity. Proper security would necessitate a microcontroller.