Home Automation on the Rise?

In the past few weeks I ran into two very promising approaches to home automation. It looks like home automation is becoming in vogue again? The first company is Gatewide and the second company is HomeHub. Both companies provide you with home automation software based on OSGi.

Gatewide provides a hardware and software combination for a video alerting server or a SOHO kit. HomeHub provides a software-only solution that runs on a Windows PC. A primary use case for both systems is camera based security integrated with sensors, actuators and Internet connectivity. The new generation of cheap wireless cameras combined with widespread adoption of ADSL has made it possible to provide standards based security solutions that provide much more functionality than dedicated proprietary products of security companies.

The strategy differences between the companies are significant. Gatewide sells hardware for a one time fee, no network services and remote management is involved. HomeHub gives away the software but charges a monthly fee for remote management and provides a number of networked based services like a folder that is available everywhere and access to the camera's through NAT and firewalls.

The HomeHub model allowed me to download the software and play with it. So last night I installed it on my laptop. Last time I was in the states I had bought two wireless DCS 900W cameras, and fortunately they were supported. The user interface looks crisp and the setup was very doable.

Still, there is work left because my wife would have a hard time filling in the IP number of the camera. This is not the fault of HomeHub, it is the almost criminal neglect of our industry to pay attention to usability. The wireless D-Link camera is shipped with a fixed IP number on its ethernet interface. The only purpose of the ethernet interface is to allow the input of the wireless network information, a waste of money. But it is even hard to fail D-Link, because how could you make this plug-and-play? One of the greatest shortcomings of 802.11 standards is the overly complicated way of configuring workstations. DHCP is nice, unfortunately with a secure setup, it does not work.

There are several easy solutions for this usability problem. For example, the wireless telephony standard DECT solved this quite elegantly. You press a button on the base station and a button on the device you want to connect. They exchange some information and are connected. Very safe because it requires physical access and very cheap because it only requires a button on the base station and the device.

There are many examples like this, and companies like Gatewide and HomeHub will have to work hard to make this configuration aspect simple enough for us mere mortals. The OSGi specifications provide a clean model to work on this, it would be great if the lessons that these companies are learning could be fed back in future specifications. It would be even greater if a number of companies could work together to develop the needed drivers and applications, if the market takes off it is going to be more than big enough for all of us. Interested?

  Peter Kriens

posted by Peter @ Wednesday, November 09, 2005