Home automation with Open moko

[Al Johnson]

On Friday 31 July 2009, sriranjan wrote:
> Patryk Benderz wrote:
> >> Will a dongle that attaches to FR and an embedded system that connects
> >> to home grid and then be able to control your home appliance from FR be
> >> a product worth a consumer market?
> >
> > Yes, but i would prefer to control such a grid by wifi or bluetooth,
> > without wireing/connecting any dongle to FR.
>
> But bluetooth is of a limited range.Say you are in you car and coming
> home and you want to get your heater up and running so that you can have
> a hot bath.Now if you have an Xbee say 500 m or 1km you are from your
> home you can switch it on and by the time you get there it will be hot.

Poor choice of example - if I had a heating system that needed such a trigger 
it would take longer to get up to temperature than the travel time from 1km 
away, even by foot. For long range control I would be looking at internet or 
phone based systems like asterisk or CSD dialin connection.

There does seem to be a market for wireless touchscreen home remotes, many of 
them very expensive. I doubt this market would accept a dongle - it just 
wouldn't look cool enough. If you can build it into the FR, or recase it to 
enclose the dongle, you may be able to sell into that market.

You probably won't find any overlap between that market and this list though - 
we're by definition internet-centric and likely to build our own solution. 
There may also be some resistance to ZigBee's GPL incompatibility and IP 
policies.

http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Zigbee/Zigbee-Linux-and-the-GPL.html