Exactly What Is Home Automation

Exactly What Is Home Automation

by

Victor Epand

Home automation, which is also called smart homes or domotics, is a field within building automation that specializes in the specific automation requirements of private homes and in the application of automation techniques for the comfort and security of its residents.

Although many techniques are used in building automation such as light control, climate control, control of doors and window shutters, security systems, and surveillance systems are also used in home automation. Additional functions in home automation can include the control of multi-media home entertainment systems, automatic plant watering and pet feeding, automatic scenes for dinners and parties, and a more user friendly control interface.

When home automation is installed during construction of a new home, usually control wires are added before the interior walls are installed. These control wires run to a controller, which will then control the environment. Some standards use communication and control wiring, some embed signals in the power line, some use radio frequency signals, and some use a combination of several methods. Control wiring is hardest to retrofit into an existing house. Some appliances include USB that is used to control it and connect it to a domotics network.

In extreme installations, rooms can sense not only the presence of a person but know who that person is and perhaps set the appropriate lighting, temperature, and music and television taking into account the day of week, time of day, and other factors. Other automated tasks may include setting the air conditioning to an energy saving setting when the house is unoccupied, and restoring the normal setting when an occupant is about to return.

More sophisticated systems can maintain an inventory of products, recording their usage through an RFID tag, and prepare a shopping list or even automatically order replacements. Some practical implementations of home automation are for example when an alarm detects a fire or smoke condition, then all lights in the house will blink to alert occupants. If the house is equipped with a home theater, then a home automation system can shut down all audio and video components to alert the user to a possible fire or a burglar.

The elements of a domotics system are the controllers, sensors, and actuators. From the point of view of where the intelligence of the domotic system resides, there are three different architectures. The first is centralized architecture, which is a centralized controller receives information of multiple sensors and, once processed, generates the opportune orders for the actuators. The second is distributed architecture, which is all the intelligence of the system is distributed by all the modules that are sensors or actuators. Usually it is typical of the systems of wiring in bus. Finally, there is mixed architecture, which is systems that have a decentralized architecture as far as which they have several small devices able to acquire and to process the information of multiple sensors and to transmit them to the rest of devices distributed by the house.

Lighting control systems involves aspects related to controlling electric lights. Extinguished general of all the lights of the house, automation of switched off / ignition in every point of light, and the regulation of the illumination according to the level of ambient luminosity. Natural lighting control involves controlling window shades, LCD shades, draperies, and awnings.

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