Overview

Use Whzan to control lights, power and appliances in your home or weekend house from anywhere with a web connection.

Home automation control is quite simply the control of devices, appliances and lighting in a domestic environment (although in this case it can be anywhere there is power).

There are several ways to automate appliances in your home. In this application case study, we are going to look at the versatility of Whzan and demonstrate a simple starter case. (A visualization of how it works can be found here.)

Obviously, when building a new home, it would be cool to include the individual control of power to lights and sockets.  For most of us, we find that our house is already built and that rewiring the home is too expensive to consider.

Step up X10! It is a cracking idea created by Pico Electronics in Scotland in the 1970s. Basically, electrical outlets can be commanded to go on, off or dim by messages sent over the home wiring circuits. A low cost (~$20) range of plug-in devices mean that there is no need to alter the wiring at all. For each zone (usually the whole house) under control, an X10 control device is used to command X10 devices. These devices look like the examples below. Getting more serious, there is a range of replacement wired switches and sockets that can be inserted in place of the existing electrical switches; these work in the same way but provide a neater finish.

The X10 control device can be connected to a PC for local control, but if that PC has access to the internet, Whzan can be used for remote control from any other internet point.  X10 equipment looks like this:

When an X10 controller box wants to turn something on or off, it sends a message through the wiring circuits, and every connected X10 device can see it. To identify separate devices, a simple address code is set at each device (like a mailbox number).  The code has two parts: a House code (A-P) and a Unit code (1-16). The House code is used to separate circuits and each House code may have its own controller. The Unit code is used to identify different devices on each circuit.

A controller device will send a command to instruct selected devices to turn on or off, or where applicable, to dim to a certain level.   Each device will see the command and those with the same address will perform the action. Several devices can have the same address, so you could use a single command to turn on multiple garden lights, for example.  An X10 controller can set any combination of House and Unit codes, but only retains the status of those on the same house address.

Some controllers (e.g. CM11U, CM11 USA, XM11) have a computer/PC interface and you will need one of these to try the Whzan system out.

Always follow the manufacturer's installation instructions for all your devices and ensure that those devices are installed, housed, maintained and operated correctly according to the manufacturer's instructions and the legislation in your home country.

Remember that home automation equipment may operate at any time due to environmental conditions, power supply fluctuations or other external factors outside of your control.