Background

I guess that I have always been interested in automation control of different kinds; ever since the summer jobs during High School at the local factory where I got in touch with industry automation systems.

At about the same time I read in the amazing computer journal of the 80's, american Byte Journal about a communication protocol called X10 that was used in the states to control lighting systems in your home. I didn't pay much attention though, partly because I was busy learning to design computers and assembly programming, and partly because it was 110V/60 Hz only, and in Sweden we use 240V/50Hz. I guess it kept brewing in my head though...

My first piece of real estate demands new technology...

Much much later (2002) I decided to do some renovations of the newly aquired apartment where I was living at the time. Home automation had had a peak during the dotcom years around 2000, but only a lot of talk, and not much happened for real. I looked into it and found that of the promises of the dotcom companies (refrigerators that oreder milk for you seemed a common one!) nothing came out. However, there were plenty of companies selling light control systems for whole apartment buildings or offices. Unfortuntely it was in a whole other price range than what I could afford. I seem to recall estimating the cost to retrofit my 1 bedroom apartment to be around 40 000 Euro!

So, no new electricity system, instead, I went the home theater route and enjoyed setting up a (for the time at least) excellent home theater system. Even more fun, I had to construct the first electronics design in 20 or so years to control the in-roof motorized screen.

More extensive research for the next apartment

2005-2007 brought a lot of new personal development (a little bit of which can be glimpsed at http://petersresa.blogspot.com), the result of which was that me and my beloved Helena (see http://helenaopeter.blogspot.com) decided to move in together. Neither my nor her apartment was deemed worthy, so we went hunting for a new one. There's a lot to be said about that, but finally we found a true dream apartment, in a part of the city that we love. Or at least it had a lot of potential. Form the beginning we more or less expected to move in right away after fixing up the surfaces little. But after thing about it for a while, we decided that it could be so much better by renovating more completely. That's a story unto itself (that might be told one day elsewhere...), but what was important for this blog is that it made me re-visit the home automation scene in Sweden.

To begin with, it looked about the same as a few years ago, with expensive systems everywhere. But then I found an article about X10 in Sweden...

Quite soon, I figured that X10 fit the bill perfectly:

1. Pricewise, it is maybe a tenth or so of the price of a lot of the competing systems!
2. Although performance (switch speed), and reliability (does the light always go on when you press the key?) is not top-notch in a standard configuration, after some reading I was confident that I could design a system that was "good enough". Maybe not good enough to control a facory, but definitely god enough for our apartment.