1.2 Commercial Solutions

The number of attempts to standardize home automation communication protocols has been ongoing nearly as long as Mr. Coffee has been in existence. One of the earliest major players was X10, a company that still offers basic and relatively inexpensive home automation solutions today. X10 takes advantage of existing electrical wiring in the home. It uses a simple pulse code protocol to transmit messages from the X10 base station or from a computer connected to an X10 communication interface. But problems with signal degradation, checksums, and return acknowledgments of messages, as well as X10’s bulky hardware and its focus on controlling electrical current via on/off relay switches, have constrained X10’s broader appeal.

Other residentially oriented attempts at standards, such as CEBus and Insteon, have been made, but none have attained broad adoption in the home. This is partly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of having appliance and home electronics manufacturers create devices with these interfaces and protocols designed into their products.

Most recently, Google has placed its bet on the Android operating system being embedded into smart devices throughout the home. Time will tell if Google will succeed where others have failed, but history is betting against it.

Rather than wait another twenty years for a winning standard to emerge, embedded computing devices exist today that employ standard TCP/IP to communicate with other computers. This hardware continues to drop to fractions of the prices they cost only a few years ago. So while the market continues to further commoditize these components, the time is now for software developers, home automation enthusiasts, and tinkerers to design and implement their own solutions. The lucky few will uncover and market a cost-effective, compelling solution that will one day catch on like wildfire and finally provide the impetus to forever change our domestic lives.