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Design Criteria:
Desired Characteristics of
lighting and controls
I have been working on and off for several years to construct a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hard-wired lighting system for home automation and environmental control with the following desiderata:
1) Integrate with comprehensive home automation systems (initially Savoy’s CyberHouse www.savoysoft.com)
2) Run stand-alone in a basic, fall-back mode without a 24x7 PC computer
3) Use open-standards hardware and software where feasible
4) Incorporate illumination, electrical power usage, and other feedback
5) Incorporate natural lighting by allowing for specified total illumination rather than specified output as is conventional
6) Facilitate energy measurement and management
7) Allow for expansion to include functions other than lighting including audio and “scene” control
8) Have graceful and safe degradation and failure modes, using multiple fall-back modes if needed
9) Meet applicable parts of the National Electrical Code (NEC)
10) Cost significantly less than commercial systems (that do less)
11) Provide for mechanical contact switching at 100% brightness, eliminating the wasted energy, reduced illumination, and heat from solid-state relays.
12) Offer an interface that
a. Is user-friendly and “transgenerational” (see http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n/web/index.htm )
b. provides visual, audible and tactile feed-back
c. introduces negligible delay in response and
d. is consistent with the décor in our historic early-19th-century American house
I liked the basic architecture of www.centralite.com and www.touchplate.com systems but list prices for (e.g.) 24- and 36-dimmer Centralite systems were $6,000 * and $8000 respectively ($220-$250 per dimmer) not including wiring or installation. My target budget was $2000 for a 32-light system with 64 individual controls. The additional 32 controls will be used for 2-and 3-way dimmers, fan controls, audio volume controls, “scene” controllers and so on.
* 2004 prices are as low as $3500 (less wire and iinstallation).
