What is X10?
X10 in action: You come
home late at night and pull into your driveway its very
dark. You press a button on your keychain remote - boom
- your driveway floodlights turn on. You walk up to your
front door and press the remote again and -boom- your house
lights come on. One last press and your driveway lights
shut off.
That was just one example of many that X10 home
automation offers. With this technology you are
able to schedule lights to go on and off automatically,
remotely control lights and appliances, or even
turn lights on and off when you enter or leave a room. There
is so much you can do with X10 home automation technology.
What makes X10 automation work? Developed in the late 1970's,
it is a communication system that uses standard home wiring
as its network. There are different X10 modules
that you can plug into your wall sockets communicate to
each other to create home automation tasks.
X10 commands consist of two parts a)
the command, and b) what’s going
to execute the command. The command part is something like
turn light on, dim 50%, or turn light off. The device that
will execute the command is a little complex. Every X10
listening or receiving module has an address. This address
has a housecode and a unit code. Addresses are usually B16,
D10, A1. You can assign the address for each X10 module.
A module will only execute commands that are addressed to
it. (Although there is a panic mode in x10 security where
you can turn on ALL X10 controlled lights).
The great thing about X10 home automation
is it is scalable. Which means you can start with a simple
system and expand from there if needed. Most x10
modules plug into a standard wall socket and are
ready to go. They also offer more advanced modules that
would require some basic knowledge of household wiring.
If your able to hardwire a ceiling fan then you would be
able to hard wire X10 modules.
Take X10 home automation to the next level and add a computer
control to your X10 automation. With your home computer
and X10 computer interface and software
you can create timers for your X10 devices, you can create
a macros (series of simple commands) to do more complicated
tasks(control your outdoor Christmas lights!!).
As stated before with X10 home automation
you can start slow with simple tasks then as your needs
expand your x10 home automation can grow with you !
