Welcome to Creative Control Concepts, your source for X-10 Relay Boards, RS-485 Interfaces, the iLock Electronic Lock, HCS-II Upgrades, and more.
When we first released the iLock, it was called the ‘Digilock’. However, we soon found another company selling entry controls with the same name and decided to change the name. We searched high and low to see if any other companies were marketing an ‘iLock’ for access control at the time. We couldn’t find anything, so the Digilock became the iLock.
About 3 years ago, we started to get queries from car owners who had iLocks installed in their vehicles. They usually wanted additional key fobs, but we never got into details about the system they had. I had a couple people who bought a car used with an iLock ask how to disable it, which we helped them with. Nothing extraordinary. Until about a year ago, when we had someone send an email very upset that our 800 number was now a gay sex/porn line (800-759-5625). Needless to say, we were a little surprised. We didn’t have an 800 number. I exchanged a few emails and finally they sent me some digital pictures of the system their car had. Apparently a company had started marketing an almost identical system to ours for car security and called it the iLock. The name of the company and an 800 number were embossed on the key fobs holding the iButton keys. It definitely wasn’t our product. Since then we’ve had a handful of people contact us about their ‘iLock’. Almost universally they mention the 800 number that routes them to a sex line. That’s how we know it’s not our system! The makers of that iLock system are clearly no longer in business, so people usually end up here asking us if we can help.
So if you have an ‘iLock’ system in your car or house - it’s easy to tell if it’s our system or not. Their system’s key fobs will have the name ‘iLock’ and an 800 number embossed on them. The key fobs with them are usually clear blue or purple plastic. Our key fobs come in a variety of colors, but have no writing on them at all and are opaque. It appears they both use Dallas iButton technology, but I’ve never had one of these other iLocks so I can’t say for sure if our key fobs will work. Thinking back, we may have sold a few key fobs to people who had this other system, not ours, and none have complained that their fob we sent didn’t work. So if you still have the instructions for programming a new key into your iLock from the other defunct company, our key fobs MAY work. But I can’t guarantee it.
If you have one of these systems in your car and no longer use it, let me know. Especially if you still have the instruction manual. We might like to get ahold of one so we can help other users of this system program new keys or even writeup instructions for swapping out our system for theirs. Contact me at support@cc-concepts.com if you do.
X-10 is everyone’s favorite home automation scapegoat. Yet done right, with the proper filtering and amplification, it can work VERY well, as I’ve noted before in articles I’ve written about my home. With 400A electrical service, plus a 100A panel off a separate meter and a detached garage served by a 60A circuit a good 75′ of conduit away from the main house - and X-10 controls the lights reliably. I can’t remember the last time a light came on by itself, except when the 2 year old found the remote lying around!
I know this is a marketing pitch, but it’s nice to see companies using X-10 for a cost effective solution. This email came out recently from ACT Solutions and I thought it was an innovative and cost effective solution to energy conservation, so I figured I’d share it. My only thought is why 2-Way X-10 in a closed loop setup wasn’t considered (well it may have been, but from the specs it doesn’t seem likely). I’ve always thought X-10 acknowledgments would be the perfect solution to PLC interference, but it’s never taken off. Sending Status Requests, while nice when you want to find out the status of a device, are overkill for immediate closed loop control. I like the idea of receivers echoing back an acknowledgment that a command was received. Sure, you’d have to ensure all devices knew to ‘wait’ for the acknowledgment before sending again, but that’s not necessarily a huge deal.
Anyway, I digress. In this case, it’s clear that a simple timeout was the simple solution to keep things cost effective.
Our production department is currently working on an order for one customer, to prepare 4,592 wall-mount, A10 (X-10 compatible) receivers (see http://www.act-solutions.com/pdfs/PCCSpecs/RS214_spec.pdf) with special, custom designed firmware. When installed into multi-family apartment buildings, they will become the "business-end" of a system to load-shed the air-conditioner compressors when commanded by a TB134 transmitter (see http://www.act-solutions.com/pdfs/PCCSpecs/tb134234334x_spec.pdf).
The "fail-safe" feature is done by the special firmware which gives the receivers a built-in time-out. Even under the most complicated and highly unlikely failure scenario (like if the front-end computer fails, the transmitter fails, the coupling fails, etc.) every receiver will turn itself back on after a 15 minute time-out. The residents will never be left without air-conditioning.
While we here at ACT continue to develop new RF products in our HomePro, RF, Z-Wave product line, it is nice to know that when the application is right, sometimes the older, more mature X-10/A10 technology is just right for the job.
I’ll admit, the most fun I’ve had doing a small embedded design was writing the code to process X-10 signals in a PIC for our X-10 Relay Boards. It’s not overly complex, but the fun was trying to write code that would improve the reliability of processing the received signals.
Given my background in embedded systems design, I’ve always felt more comfortable with home automation systems based on embedded controllers than those based on PCs. Home Automation doesn’t require huge amounts of processing power and embedded controllers tend to use simpler control programs sometimes giving you more reliability. PCs seemed like overkill and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I rely on Windows to control anything in my house. Of course, there is always Linux, which I trust to run many things more complex than home automation. Many users use Mister House or other custom Linux solutions for their automation. But it still seemed crazy to run a 250W PC 24 hours a day to send X-10 commands or bit bang an RS-485 port.
These days, the concept of a PC has begun to change significantly. VIA’s mini-ITX and nano-ITX platforms have significantly shrunk the size of a full blown PC. You can have a complete Linux based PC running home automation tasks drawing less than 100W. Closer. But the ITX boards are expensive. You’ll spend well over $400 for a case, board, hard drive, and memory. Too expensive for a home automation controller that I still have to write software for!
We now ship internationally to Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We will be slowly adding other countries to our ecommerce system as we verify shipping rates. If you wish to place an international order and your country is not listed, drop us a line and we’ll get your country added or provide a special quote for shipping.
Have you used a CCC product in a unique project? Why not share your solution with everyone? As part of our effort to have this site be interactive, we want to share stories of customers who have used our products in unique situations. Send your write-ups, or links to sales@cc-concepts.com and we’ll post the best ones we receive. Including pictures is a plus!
Welcome to the new and improved Creative Control Concepts! We’ve significantly updated our website and eCommerce solution allowing you to find what you need faster and ordering is easier than ever. To see detailed descriptions of our products, click the Products tab at the top of your screen. To see our complete catalog in a condensed format, click the Catalog tab where our complete product line is displayed, broken up by categories.
You’ll find we have narrowed our product focus a bit. The HCS-II has been discontinued, however we still have an extensive archive of HCS-II information available. We are still selling the popular HCS-II upgrade kits. If you find you need spare parts for an existing HCS-II system, let us know - we probably have them.
We are still selling our popular iLock system, X-10 Relay Boards, and a selection of RS-485 interfaces that can be used with the HCS-II and some other RS-485 capable home automation and embedded control systems. We also have a selection of Sensors and Accessories for home automation which we hope to expand.
Our intent is to have this site be interactive. As we add products to our catalog, we’ll post news items announcing them which will allow customers like you to comment on them or make suggestions for other things you’d like to see us carry. As we get involved with various projects, we’ll highlight them here as well. If you have any ideas on how to make the site easier to navigate or make it easier to use, by all means let us know in the comments. News items will likely be posted at irregular intervals, so we suggest subscribing to our RSS feed so you get notified of new posts quickly.
We accept all major credit cards and Paypal payments. Note you do NOT need a PayPal account to pay with a credit card. Just click the Continue button at the bottom of the payment screen and ignore the PayPal login section. We ship all of our products to the US, Canada, and United Kingdom via USPS Priority Mail. If you need our products shipped to a country beyond the US, Canada, or the U.K., contact us for a shipping quote.
