Domotica - EN

Home automation a pioneering development

By applying solar panels with smart energy meters and a new central heating boiler with smart thermostat the beginning was made of a new project to an old desire to further automate everything in house and make manageable. There are more and more products that 'smart' are mentioned as light bulbs, plugs, smoke detectors and the aforementioned thermostat that can talk to each other and can be controlled remotely or programmed. This technique is summarized under the term "automation" as described in Wikipedia:

Home automation or smart home (also known as domotics or domotica) is the residential extension of building automation and involves the control and automation of lighting, heating (such as smart thermostats), ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), and security, as well as home appliances such as washer/dryers, ovens or refrigerators/freezers that use WiFi for remote monitoring. Modern systems generally consist of switches and sensors connected to a central hub sometimes called a "gateway" from which the system is controlled with a user interface that is interacted either with a wall-mounted terminal, mobile phone software, tablet computer or a web interface, often but not always via internet cloud services.

Arise

The first home automation applications were often systems that existed in the automated industrial or office environment, and were fitted into housing for persons with disabilities. Thus they were able to gain greater autonomy and for example perform "from a wheelchair" the main domestic tasks.

Generalized use of automation, however, started only in late 20th century real breakthrough in construction and architecture, as there is also a standard was drawn up in which the various systems could be integrated and can communicate with each other. In addition, more and more people have an interest in these solutions.

The rise of the Internet, the development of technology and market for home automation accelerated. Because machine can be connected to a home network, and sometimes even were accessible over the internet, and took the applicability enormously. Examples include protection of housing and monitoring or controlling cameras, thermostat and lighting. In addition, more and more applications that we can operate the various devices with our smartphone or tablet. This allows the remote control became increasingly easy to control home automation devices via Wi-Fi or internet from mobile phone and tablet and may even remain in the drawer.

The development opportunities have increased in the technology, using smaller chips and components are becoming more economical in energy consumption and become more compact hardware and are sometimes much cheaper and the costs have decreased. The availability and standardization of wireless networking has increased allowing more and more automation components communicate via wifi or bluetooth. The current trend to cut costs and more environmentally conscious to go ensured energy more and more people are investing in sustainable solutions such as solar panels, heat pumps and solar water heaters. Furthermore, to extract more return than leave money in the bank with the current interest rate. To monitor the output and consumption as well as the government and energy companies point to this awareness and celebrate the urge for increased resources to gain insight into this. Again, automation offers a solution to see even remotely this information and manipulate.

Also, by developments in the technology of computers and centralized storage like NAS and media playback on various wireless applications with streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix great diversity emergence of turnkey compact solutions that are energy efficient. This makes building your own desktops, HTPC and file servers become less interesting. The automation still lie challenges and therefore are increasingly tweakers be engaged in this technology again at what came to developments in the field of open source applications and management systems for automation.