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.
