It is interesting to trace the origin of the names of market products. For example, the X10 standard owes its name to the mean Scots, who so economically designated their successful, well-known, version of the home automation protocol.

What prompted the Danes to name their standard “Z-Wave” is not exactly known. Either the proximity of the seas, or perhaps the feature of wireless load control, influenced the name of the standard. One way or another, but today he has received strong support in the face of an international consortium of leading world manufacturers and is becoming very popular.

The standard is based on the ideology of building a network (mesh - network) of devices interconnected via a radio channel. But before moving on to a specific discussion of devices running the Z-Wave protocol, we’ll figure out if automation is needed at home, and if so, which one? Any automation at home is, first of all, costs, both material and time for installation of systems ...

If you collect all the systems and standards of a smart home that are offered on the Internet today in one place, you will have to urgently measure IQ (the amount of intelligence) and decide who is the boss in the house. Products of the modern Z-Wave standard such a procedure will not hinder.

The created alliance, or open consortium, to support the new standard impresses with its composition: from the world leader in the production of Intel chips to the world electrical leader Danfoss A / S. And among 200 members of the consortium, Panasonic, Logitech, and dozens of well-known companies, often fiercely competing with each other, were “modestly lost”.

What led them all to a modest market niche (or abode) of home automation? To answer this question, let's take a closer look at the very concept of the Z-Wave standard and its prospects and its prospects. The technology was developed at the beginning of the 21st century by the small company Zensys ...

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) - a magical combination of terms for the uninitiated and a mundane reality for professionals. This material is for those who are just interested in the possibility of using them for home automation.

Let's start over, or from the “stove”. In not so distant times, electrical engineers designed their equipment based on existing discrete devices manufactured by industry. These are relays, timers, engine control buttons and a small list of devices that were available in a power that had vanished into the past.

Several decades passed, and the practice of working with individual electrical components almost stopped - the market was filled with universal devices that can perform any control and monitoring functions - PLCs. In order to understand the features and capabilities ...

Getting acquainted with the NooLite line of modules from the Nootehnika company, one does not leave the feeling of admiration mixed with distrust. Do these toy, small devices, costing less than a common magnetic starter, have such an impressive array of capabilities? Nevertheless, the NooLite system, which the manufacturer positions as specialized for lighting control, incorporates modern ideas, and it is implemented at a high technical level.

We will consider the capabilities of lighting control modules using the example of several representatives of a line of blocks whose nomenclature is constantly expanding.These are two control panels (transmitters) PU212-1 and PU313-1, power blocks (receivers) SN111-300 and SL111-300, and for those who like to manage everything from a computer, the adapter for the PC118 computer. The design of the transmitters is identical and designed for stand-alone operation in any convenient place ...

Reading about Bill Gates’s mansion worth $ 53 million, equipped with an ultra-modern “smart home” system, you involuntarily grunt: we would have his money - if the house were even “smarter”. And if you think about it, then our home is gradually acquiring elements of intelligence.

It’s rare that anyone controls a TV manually today - there is a remote control that takes care of all the setup tasks. Keychain motorists habitually lock cars. Modern refrigerators with programming operating modes, washing machines with dozens of washing programs - electronics imperceptibly, but surely enters into our everyday life.

And only lighting until recently has been deprived of attention. The emergence of a series of devices that allow you to remotely control the lighting of apartments by transmitting commands over the air, marked the end of the era of archaic keyboard switches ...

Rest in a house outside the city becomes comfortable and brings pleasure only when the tasks of maintaining the house and the plot are minimized. Often, the owners are forced to irrigate landings, control the provision of ventilation and heating at home, turn on the lighting of the site, etc.

Today, this much-needed functionality can be completely delegated, at the same time, not to hired workers, but to modern multifunctional modular electrical equipment that allows you to perform all the processes on a suburban area in automatic mode, i.e. without human intervention. Its installation is quick and easy in existing power supply systems and, thus, there is no need for complex repair work. There can be many processes, but in this article we will focus on the automatic inclusion of street lighting when darkness falls ...

One of my friends turned to me with this request: they say, I want the fireplace to turn on in the garage on a call from a cell phone. He has a workshop there, and it’s cold in the mornings, so he wants to turn on the fireplace two or three hours before arrival. Everything is very simple: he turns on the fireplace by phone, and two hours later, if he does not come, the fireplace will simply turn itself off.

Talk that this is easier to do if you buy a programmable relay did not convince him. Apparently, he might not have appeared there on some days, but this was not amenable to any accounting when programming the relay. And he would spin the counter there while the fireplace was warming an empty room.

Nowadays, there are already many industrial devices that are controlled by the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) standard — a digital standard for mobile communications or a now familiar mobile phone. This is a burglar alarm, various control cabinets ...

Almost all people complain about lack of time. The pace of our life is constantly accelerating, so any devices that accurately measure time intervals will always be in demand.

If these devices still take away from our shoulders a part of the worries of watering the lawn, turning the lights on and off, controlling various home electrical appliances and technological processes in production, they are simply necessary.

The common name for such devices is a time relay. So, a time relay is a device designed to create time delays for turning on or off signals or processes or to implement a certain sequence in their work. Typically, a time relay is used when you need to perform some action after a set period of time ...