In my prior post I introduced the basics of home automation via X10. X10 is not a new standard and specification, it has actually been around since the 1970s. And over that time is has not evolved much, if at all. X10 is incredibly popular, because of its simplicity and extensibility and low cost. But X10 also has some very real problems:

• X10 signals are not 100% reliable and can be affected by other plugged-in devices. Erroneous and seemingly random signals are not uncommon, and are hard to truly eliminate.
• X10 signals lose their strength over distances, so the bigger your house the less reliable the signals. You can buy repeaters and signal boosters, but these are not perfect.
• X10 has a very limited address range, and if your next door neighbor gets into home automation you can end up bumping into each other. And the likelihood of this happening may be higher than you think. As such, you may need to install signal filtering on the AC feed to your house to block signals from passing in and out.
• Getting X10 signals to pass between the two electrical phases in a typical U.S. AC installation can be rather painful. There are bridges that can help with this, but their installation is not for the feint of heart, and they don't seem to work perfectly.
• But the biggest drawback to X10 is the poor error correction. X10 signals are kind of tossed over the wall, a broadcast, perhaps telling device F2 to turn on. But X10 does not provide a failsafe way to check that that the signal actually reached device F2, and that device F2 truly is on. So, while things usually work and work well, when they don't there is little you can do automatically or programatically.

Still, as already said X10 remains very popular because, well, for the most part it does indeed work. And it's cheap (at least to get started). Over the years we've seen a variety of home automation technologies appear on the scene, and I've tinkered with most. But the one I've grown most impressed with, and have started to migrate to, is Insteon (created by SmartLabs). Insteon is relatively new (the first Insteon devices started appearing in mid-2005) and works much like X10 but with some very important differences:

• Insteon never suffers from signal loss because all devices are repeaters, so the more complex and sophisticated your home automation network, the stronger the signal.
• Insteon uses 3 byte device addresses, and devices have manufacturer defined addresses (a bit like NIC MAC addresses). So device addressing conflicts are a thing of the past.
• Insteon is a dual-mesh specification, featuring AC signaling like X10, but also supporting RF.
• Bridging the two AC phases with Insteon is easy, just plug one Access Point (a little white box) into any outlet on one phase and a second on any outlet on the other, and you're done. The Access Points have LEDs that will show you if they are wired correctly (on two different phases as opposed to the same phase), and you can just keep moving the second around until the LED indicates success. And as an added benefit, the Access Points act as signal repeaters and RF receivers. too.
• Most importantly, error detection and correction is built in. Devices can be easily queried, and simply publish their current state, and signals are automatically retransmitted if they were not correctly received.
• And best of all, Insteon is fully backwards compatible with X10. In fact, just about every Insteon device can also have an X10 address allowing them to respond to both signals, and most Insteon controllers can also send X10 commands, too. While not actually required by the Insteon specification, most Insteon device vendors seem to be providing X10 compatibility.
• Insteon is also much faster than X10, and thus the "inst" in Insteon.

Insteon is installed and configured in much the same way as X10 is. To install an Insteon switch you'd simply remove the original switch and replace it with the Insteon equivalent. Same for outlets, and any other devices. Addresses do not need to be defined, as every device has a preconfigured address (that is usually on a label on the device itself). Controllers can query the entire home network and find new devices automatically. And devices also identify themselves so controllers can respond intelligently (so that, for example, a switch used for fluorescent lighting that does not support dimming can identify itself so that controllers know not to try to send it dimming commands). The biggest limitation with Insteon right now is that there are far fewer devices available for it than there are for X10. But, with X10 backward compatibility, that is less of an issue. For new installations you can buy X10 devices (realizing that you'll not get the same level of functionality obviously). And for those of us with significant investments in X10 already, Insteon provides a vastly superior home automation network while not requiring tossing out any existing devices. (Of course, if you are anything like me, you'll find it hard to resist replacing those existing X10 devices once you get used to the richer functionality of their Insteon counterparts). In other words, to me, Insteon feels like what X10 should have been in the first place, and is thus the heir apparent to X10. To learn more, visit the Insteon links above. And for the largest selection of Insteon (and X10) devices, visit Smarthome (use the Insteon and X10 categories on the top left). In future posts I'll highlight some of my favorite devices, including my new all time favorite home automation controller.

Meet the Guru course events are now in the Early Bird discount. Get your seat now. Earlybird Early Bird Price: £ 950. The £250 early bird discount for the course expires 3 weeks before the beginning of the course. Don’t wait! Register now to reserve your seat at the lowest price.

  Flump is a wonderful example of what could be happening on AIR tours. It was put together by Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers during the first leg of the 2007 AIR bus tour. Flump is a cool little AIR app that can download all publicly available Flickr photos from an account. FlickrDown (open source) and Flickr AutoDownloadr are [...]

We’re finally making the move to get 2.0 out the door as a final release! Today, I tagged what was the current trunk as 1_7 and you can find that in the tags folder if you were using the trunk The trunk has been updated to 2.0 beta 1 Great White and Ralph has posted a zip [...]

Note: Just a short post to save your hair from turning gray (I know mine just did) If you ever run into a "Unable to access UserTransaction in DataService" error when working with LCDS on Tomcat 5.5.x+, make sure you configured the Java Open Transaction Manager (JOTM) correctly. You can do this by adding the following [...]

Back in February while working on an AIR application, I found myself dealing with a lot of JSON data in ActionScript. I was using the corelib library for parsing and generating JSON objects. It was all good until I realized I could improve it even further. While the JSON class does its job perfectly well, it [...]

Not sure how two months flew by since my last post but figured an "I'm not dead" post was in order. So lets see - I left my job at Blogform Digital Magazines, enjoyed a month of sunny vacation here in Oslo (with a little rain thrown in) and visited a childhood friend of mine over in Riga, Latvia.

On August 1 I joined the UX department of Tarantell where I'm doing Flash/Flex consulting. I'm lucky to work alongside some very smart and talented people which is exciting to say the least. Before I forget here comes the obvious disclaimer - any views or opinions posted here, past, present or in the future do not reflect those of my employer but you knew that because you're a smart cookie :)

Since my mom got married this week, we have family visiting from Chile and other friends from around the world. So that along with the new gig leaves very little time left over, so if anything check me on Twitter.

Not doing anything Friday? Come to the dOMi release gig @ John Dee. Get your tickets here!

Last friday was an awesome day. It was my birthday, Microsoft released Photosynth which is a product I have been watching since two years and we won the FlashForward Award in the category Sound with our Audiotool. The Audiotool development became a very interesting topic. We implemented so many things to keep stuff optimized not only [...]

I’ve got a bit of a love hate relationship with Snackr, Narciso Jaramillo’s AIR based rss ticker (watch the screencast below to see Snackr in action). Watching feeds roll along the ticker fuels an already dangerous information addiction, but I’ve never quite been able to justify having the constant bombardment of external information while working [...]

As many of you know, I am a bit of a home automation nut, and for close to a decade I've been wiring and rewiring parts of my home, while tinkering with all sorts of gadgets (some very useful, some admittedly less so). Part of the appeal is the fun factor. But there is a very practical aspect to this as well. For example, I have a large saltwater marine reef fish tank in my house (it sits in the wall between my office and the family room). A healthy reef tank needs reliable lighting, with different lights (and different intensities) at different times of the day - brightest simulated sunlight at midday, moonlights at night, and more. Water temperature needs to be monitored carefully, a sudden drastic rise in temperature is a surefire way to kill off soft corals (I know, I've had it happen). And more. And flipping all of those switches manually is a pain (especially with my travel schedule). And so the entire setup is automated. Daytime lights start to turn on at sunrise and are off by sunset, and moonlights are obviously the reverse. Temperature changes outside of a set range are immediately reported to me via SMS, and I can check the temperature from anywhere in the world at any time. Even water leaks or overflows (a real concern when you have close to three hundred gallons of water being pumped around your house) trigger immediate alarms and notification (and will soon automatically activate cutoff valves). You get the idea. So, how does this all work? Over the years I have played with a variety of home automation technologies, but have ended up sticking with X10. If you've not run into X10 before, here's what you need to know. The technology has been around for over three decades, and it is popular because it is easy to use, very flexible, and pretty cheap, too. X10 works by allowing you to send signals over your house electrical wiring. To turn a switch on or an outlet off, you simply send a message over the AC wiring specifying the switch or outlet address, and the instruction. The appeal of X10 is that it needs no special wiring or data lines or anything like that. X10 commands are sent over the same electrical lines that the devices are already connected to. Obviously, to make this work, you need switches and outlets and devices that are X10 compatible, and there are lots of these. Using standard wall light switches as an example, you'd buy an X10 replacement light switch, remove the existing one, and replace it with the X10 equivalent. The light switch would still function locally as it did before, but now it could also accept instructions sent over the same AC wiring that the switch is using to power the lights. Every X10 device on your network must have an address, and X10 addresses are 1 byte long (or technically 2 sets of 4 bits), so a maximum of 255 devices can be connected at any given time. X10 devices do not come with preset addresses, and at setup time you pick the address you want for each device (and multiple devices can actually be given the same address, which can be a blessing and a curse). A command sent over the wire is then sent as address + 4 bit instruction code (3 for on, 11 for off, 15 for dim, and so on). Commands are usually sent by other devices. For example, if you want a light switch in one part of your house to control a light elsewhere, instead of having to run new wiring (and setting up 3-way switching) you could have the new light switch set up to send commands to another light switch, essentially creating a remote control of sorts. Many home automation setups use large collections of switches and outlets and more all connected to each other. But where things become more interesting is when a controller is added to the mix. A controller lets you execute scheduled events, run through scripts in response to an action, activate entire scenes all at once (press a button on the wall marked "movie night" and the curtains close, lights dim, projector drops from ceiling, fireplace turns on, outside lights turn off to dissuade visitors ... you get the idea). Which is exactly how my fish tank setup (among other things) is automated. I have a wall mounted controller that is powered by an AC feed and also sends back signals over that same feed. It allows one touch control, execution of timed events, and more. The key is that home automation technologies like X10 allow you to break out of the simple "click this and that happens" mould. Instead, you get to mix and match triggers and their actions, using an ever growing array of triggers, and actions only limited by your imagination. And the array of X10 devices is truly remarkable. There are the obvious things, like switches and outlets and plug-in pass-through modules and keypads, to less obvious things like thermostats and motion sensors and security system integrators and irrigation system controls, to slightly more obscure devices like gas and water valves and curtain/shade openers/closers, to all sorts of connectivity modules allowing connections to IP networks and RF and phone systems. And there's a whole lot more, too. It's fun, it's easy, it's inexpensive, and it works. Usually.

I remember reading, I think possibly on Tinic’s blog, a while back that BitmapData maximum sizes would be increasing. Then I heard Jim Corbett mention it at FiTC this year, along with some details. I know I could probably find the specs in writing somewhere, but I decided to test it out myself. And then [...]

It’s been a cool Flashforward this year - my first for a while but I enjoyed the new one-track format (with short, occasionally bizarre couch-discussions between speakers), drugs advocation (thanx Robert!) and the largest conference screen i think i’ve ever seen (see above). Too many people have asked now so i just want to clear up [...]

You can download my Flash Forward San Francisco lecture files here.

I've been creating a lot of AS3 generated graphics over at Art From Code and have faced the problem of how to get the generated bitmaps (or vectors) out to files. For a lot of the files, they are quick experiments and I do a quick screenshot with Jing. For others, I've created AIR apps [...]

I really didn’t pull out my camera til the last day, but put up most of what I took that day: Check em out. Here’s Stacey doing her groupie dance:

In addition to the play-by-play, I wanted to give an overall response to the conference. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I applaud Beau and crew for taking a big risk on changing up the format. It really worked for me. There was no decisions about which presentation to see or problems with having [...]

Carrying over from the last post, Thursday wrapped up with Lynda Weinman and Erik Natzke. Lynda talked about her views on education. A bit of a dry presentation - page after page of bullet points, few if any images and Lynda mostly just reading the points and elaborating a bit. But maybe I’m just bitter [...]

Ok, it’s one thing to watch tweeners wet themselves over their new cell phones and their first text messages, it’s quite another thing to watch a teenager squeal with sophomoric tones that only a dog could hear, and it’s yet another level of “idiocy” to see some teen/twenty something texting while driving. I’ve nearly [...]

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.Tom Cargill Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.Larry Wall Measuring programming [...]