About
This is a project started by some old friends, that has worked together a long time. Our interests are extremely wide spread, everything from how to colonize Mars to how to save the planet and what technologies to use and/or invent. Maybe saving the planet is colonizing Mars?…. well that is for another blog or project.
We work in the “high tech” industry, primarily with media distribution over IP networks, wireless as well as wired. Our experience and skill set covers; Software Development, Electrical Engineering, Protocol interfaces, DSPs, Technical Management etc. Over the years we have besides work always had small side/hobby projects, but there has always been one thing that we have always re-visited, “intelligent homes”, for two reason;
- Our houses and buildings are extremely wasteful when it comes to energy, so making the house intelligent is one way of lowering the impact on the environment
- We are tech geeks, and having an intelligent house where you can change conditions or where it can anticipate your personal needs is just…… way cool
We have looked at many home automation standards over the years, and none has really felt that good, or been that practical. About 4-5 years a ago we were introduced to ZigBee as a technology being considered for a media distribution project, and we felt it was very interesting. Not for video (too some people a big disappointment), but for other things. Once again the “intelligent home” idea popped up, and we concluded that one of the issues is not how you turn on a light on a certain time, or how you can detect that a door is open, it is about controlling the environment, to be more exact our discussion was around how energy inefficient houses are and what you can do about it.
We decided that “this time we will go after our utopia of an intelligent home and start a project”. Said and done we came to some conclusions (after spending some time discussing what intelligence means, and just how intelligent a house can be?) that the first thing to start working on are sensors. Our old ZigBee encounter was brought back to life, and after some research we said “Lets do a project and use ZigBee as the standard (as much as applicable and practical) to keep it all together. A main reason for choosing ZigBee is that it is practically made for sensors, and is extremely power efficient, and to make a home intelligent a huge part is “measuring” conditions in the house.
Our goal is to create working proof of concepts, using existing and open standards. Our first goal is to set-up a sensor system to measure temperature in the house. We know there are many existing systems and solutions around automatic thermostats, but we want to find a more versatile and modular system, and we see “temperature control” as a component of a larger system in our vision around an “intelligent home”, not as a separate system.
The ZigBee Project Team
