That sums it up nicely. I put up with a lot to save a lot. As long as X-10 problems are still solvable, I am willing to do the work (and have the tools) to troubleshoot them. The benefits outweigh the frustration. If I had some sort of X-10 RF meter that worked the way the ESM1 or the Monterey did, I would consider my troubleshooting toolkit complete.
I don't know of many manufacturers who market their products any other way!
-- Bobby G.
Hey, I'm just glad to hear yet another retailer is abandoning sales of X10-based products. Things like light switches shouldn't have to be "configured" in the horrible ways X10 requires.
Crappy build quality and inferior components ring any bells? To say nothing of horrible user experience (switch gear) and miserably bad software.
Yeah, good, fast, cheap... pick two. X10 doesn't even hit two of the points. That it's inexpensive doesn't mean it's not crap.
Ha, "rich selection" and home automation, now THERE'S a pipe dream.
Seeing as how you're peddling a "solution" to the X10 problems it's rather disingenuous to believe any opinions you're spouting here.
There were a number of mislabelled and mismatched remotes and promotion material. I bought one recently on Ebay that was completely erroneoud. IIRC, that remote was one of the cheapest and least functional remotes ever made. They also had the worst RF range, although that might have just been a production issue that could have been fixed by tuning. I think the UR19A was also made before the widespread advent of DVD players. Worst of all, it's not able to learn commands from other remotes. They made a number of different remotes, all with their own different strengths but having a learning function is a basic necessity, IMHO, to solve just the problem you are facing.
In the world of consumer electronics, that's two generations ago. I don't even think the original maker is required to provide spare parts for more than 5 years, although many do.
IIRC, they went from sales of 2 million dollars per year to 20 million dollars as a result of that campaign. You and I may have hated it, but it made them, at one point, one of the fastest growing companies on the Internet.
Vouchers were flooding the Internet in the 2000-2001 time frame, IIRC. They provided some pretty signficant discounts and the more you bought, the more vouchers and deals you got. I have about 20 Hawkeyes because for a while, you could get them for $3 or so, or even for free. If you had a work address, a business address and a neighbor you could really acquire a lot of equipment. It must have been cost effective because they made an *awful* lot of money. I don't recall being able to break it down across product lines: it may easily be that they sold more X-10 cams to voyeurs than the home automation equipment.
Manufacturers love to sell products that are never used because they don't have to spend a dime supporting them!
But you *can* buy it. I just bought 4 more because they make X-10 so much more reliable. Does it solve *all* my X-10 problems? No, but I never expected it to. What it does is sharply reduce the chances of something being left on in the house after I send an ALL OFF command, and that's one of the primary reasons I use X-10.
-- Bobby G.
Ah, now I understand. You are arguing the X10 company, not the X10 protocol. I agree you get what you pay for in quality from X10. But what do you expect in a device that has to be made for a few bucks? I never liked the spongy mechanical feel to their wall switches. While those worked fine for almost two decades at our last house, we upgraded to Leviton here.
I can't comment on there recent software, but I was involved with their beta test on the CM14A (precursor to the CM15A). Usually all identified bugs were resolved in a timely manner. The only continuing problem for me was the serial interface. Everything else, including RF and macros, did what it should, and I continued to use that unit for a couple of years after the Beta test ended.
Lets face it, X10 is after the low end market. If you want "quality" X10 products, go with a company like Leviton.
Most of my posts have been directed at helping increase the reliability of their X10 systems. I always suggest identifying and isolating problem devices first. Usually 100% reliability can be achieved that way. I often have reported that I had virtually 100% reliability myself before adding the XTB. I offer that unit as an alternative to the repeaters that many people use in larger houses. And it is being offered barely above the cost of the components themselves, especially in kit form.
Bottom line is that X10 (the protocol) is getting a raw deal from people like yourself. The AC power distribution in a typical home is a very complex problem. There are different ideas on how best to deal with that, but as yet I don't see any clear winner. RF can work fine on a clear channel, but I certainly have enough experience with that medium to know its limitations.
In summary, X10 CAN offer a lot of bang for the buck for people willing to learn how to use it properly.
Jeff
I know. My wife reports whenever anything technical is amiss.
I guess it depends on how one uses X10. Here we have no problem with X10 speed. I don't think I have ever seen a collision except for the ones purposely induced while testing. We have one controller that pretty much does everything. We do have palmpads and wired remotes in case we need something out of the ordinary, but that may average just a few commands a day.
I investigated the CFL issue while testing the XTB-II. As reported earlier, a set of 4 unfiltered generic (cheap) CF bulbs produced enough noise when beating together that they almost mimicked a X10 transmission. A couple of times they morphed one X10 command into another. If a device that could do this was developed for the military, it would be called a jammer. So people bring these "jammers" into their homes and complain that it causes problems for X10. Maybe the complaint should be directed toward the CF manufacturers so they don't radiate so much crap. We do have CF bulbs from well-known companies that cause no problem at all, so it can be done.
X10 did produce two-way modules that can provide a status acknowledge. I understand they don't sell nearly as well as the cheap receive only modules. So cost remains the biggest driver in X10 sales.
People bitch that X10 is garbage. If you take a step backward and look at the big picture, most of the electronic stuff isn't much better. Our Sony XBR TV blew up its HV supply under warranty. Then all the larger components on the main circuit board had to be resoldered because of circular cracks that caused intermittents as people walked through the room. Then the tuner failed. Now the sound board has some intermittent. And Sony isn't a cheap brand.
Lets face it, most manufacturers make things as cheaply as possible. In today's world volume sales go to the lowest priced items. If you can price it a buck lower by leaving out the line filter, then maybe you will get a much larger piece of the pie. And that is X10's problem.
Jeff
"X10" (no hyphen) does denote the company X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. aka X10.com
But was Pico's experiment # 10 first dubbed "X10" or was it "X-10" (with hyphen) as I've assumed and written for years? I've seen different early accounts/punctuation.
... Marc Marc_F_Hult
I bought this one at X10.com so I was hoping that it would be the real thing. Learning remotes are nice but they don't do you any good when the original remote broke. That was the reason I bought this one, tacked it on to an X10 order.
You may be right with the tuning. I found that almost all of the X10 modules I bought where not receiving on 120kHz but seriously de-tuned. Or probably not tuned at all in production. Might be the same with the RF parts.
They better do or their reputation sinks to junk status. But they often charge so much for spare parts that it makes no sense.
Did they release those numbers? I wonder if they can sustain that with such cheesy advertising.
They also had some nice specials. Like a bunch of appliance modules for a good discount. Not that's gone, the package deals contain too much fluff stuff that I don't need. Don't need another keychain remote that doesn't work for us anyway. And certainly not another UR19A ;-)
Oh yeah, they do love that!
This device needs to be available via X10.com and other channels. It could give X10 a real boost. The common perception among geeky folks around here is that X10 is unreliable. Well, the way it's sold through the existing channels (without XTB) it is IMHO unreliable.
X-10 maintains their Community Forum at
To give credit where credit is also due, ACT's
In particular, the TI103 RS-232 --> Powerline transmitter
My non-authoritative understanding is that ACT is also leaving the X-10 arena.
(FWIW, I will be parting with both my TI103 and XTB in the near future through an electronic 'porch sale'. )
... Marc Marc_F_Hult
I know what you mean. X-10's been a help in that they really do have a lot of technical information on their products as well as step-by-step stuff for non-techies. Ever since the "stuck Palmpad button" when I was away and out-of-touch I've had to leave pretty specific troubleshooting documentation. In that case, she got by because most of the lamps she uses are operable by local control and that's the only thing that worked. A stuck RF transmitter button (now that it's hooked to the XTB turbocharger) crippled almost every X-10 device in the house. Of course this happened on a critical day for her. It's also happened to me when I least needed it and for a while, it looked like we were going back to the land of the 99 cent dumb snap switches again. There's hardly anything you can do that would make an entire house-full of simple manual toggle switches misbehave as badly as X-10 did that day.
Experiences like that make it easy to see where Bill K's opinion is coming from. Those are the situations where the Monterey is worth its weight in polonium. It displayed a steady stream of P1 ON's (along with collisions and other junk) that enable me to at least figure out what transmitter it was. Even though I disabled the P housecode transceiver, the continuous transmission of the RF knocked out all RF controllers like the remotes, the stickaswitches and lots of other stuff. Now I have a "executive summary" document that tries to explain how to detect such a problem with the Monterey and what things to disable and in what order to attempt to get things working. What I'd really like is a handheld RF detector that I could wave around the room that would beep when it encountered a stream of X-10 RF with some degree of directionality.
Very wise words. I think that one sentence explains how as many people seem to love X10 as hate it. If you don't use multiple Hawkeyes, you probably won't see many collisions but if you have more than one and they're near each other, trouble awaits. The equation is also dependent on the number of people moving around at any one time. I find their greatest use is as a guardian. Put one in a drawer that shouldn't be opened and it will leave a record in Activehome of exactly when it was opened.
The "controller-centric" is very well-suited to the XTB but it's only one of many, many possible X-10 configurations. I had given up on the CM11A and the TW-523 that comes with the Ocelot because they had become so unreliable without a signal boost. I am slowly redesigning the system to bring those devices back on line.
Our setup and use patterns are almost completely the opposite so it's easy to see how one man's X-10 glass may be half full and another's broken in bits on the floor!
It's such a problem for the military that they have come up with schemes to broadcast highly compressed packets at the ionization trails of meteors to bounce directly to a remote receiver because such directed transmission are hard to jam.
That turned into a bigger issue than I thought when I labelled CF bulbs for use in certain sockets only. That seemed a little extreme to SWMBO. Things became even worse when I went back and bought the same brand of GE CF bulbs, the same model number, the same everything except a few digits on the inkjet lot numbers. The second batch was noisy as hell and jammed the X10 signal where the first batch did not. That's when I bought the big box of filters and put them on all lamps that could accommodate a CF bulb.
One would hope that manufacturers of switching power supplies and CF bulbs would have gotten enough bad feedback from angry X-10 users to induce them to change their designs. But in a world where a 1 cent price difference matters so deeply to the bean counters, I suspect they won't make CFL's and switching power supplies more X-10 friendly unless they can also make it cheaper at the same time.
That's one conclusion you can draw. Another is that they're basically useless because they tell you the state of the switch, not of the load!
I've owned Sony's since their first 6 transistor shirt pocket radio. Their quality peaked around the time of the TC55 portable cassette recorder. Built like a Sherman tank, I still see reporters shoving it in people's faces on TV. It was downhill from there. What can you expect from a company that paid Michael Jackson 1 BILLION dollars (since reneged upon) and who invented the portable music device but let Apple and the Ipod stomp it in the marketplace? Losers!
One of them, anyway. (-:
-- Bobby G.
Ah, yes. The ultimate driving machine. Not! My brother has had a couple of BMW's. They were the worst cars he ever owned. Every time *anything* goes wrong it's a $1,000 repair and unfortunately, something is
*always* going wrong.
That's usually a recipe for failure in the marketplace.
But from what I can see that's not the same. It requires a PC with RS232 (which "modern" PCs don't have anymore) that has to be always on. Not something most people would want. Also, this one doesn't boost the RF transceiver's powerline signal.
Let us know when they start the fire sale.
Will there be coffee and bagels at the porch sale?
Had ACT decided to stay with X-10, it would have been easy to provide a USB or TTL version. As is, they provide four different versions for 110 or 230, single-phase or three phase 50 or 60 hz.
Point is that an X-10 transmitter with a much stiffer power supply and higher output voltage (designed by folks trying to make X-10 work in real environments, including industrial and commercial locations, instead of pushing the cheapest product possible) has been available for years.
Of course USB -->RS-RS232 converters are cheap and not functionally bigger or less convenient than a USB cable. So availability or not of a USB version is at best a 3rd-order consideration IME.
And RS-232 is *far* from dead in HA and AV applications. RS-232 is more prevalent than ever in high audio in part because it is better suited than USB in most/many cases.
My thermostats use RS-232-->RS-485 (as best I know, there are *no* USB thermostats) my audio matrix mixers are RS-232-->485, the interface to my security system is RS-232, the Elk is RS-232, the IR controller is RS-232, and on and on. The only device I can think of that might be USB is the INSTEON controller and I have both RS-232 and USB versions with the RS version the one in actual use because I can plug it in next to the entrance panel which is too far from the HA PC for un-aided USB.
Ok, I'll bite ;-) How does an XTB "boost the RF transceivers powerline signal" when it is used between an TW523 or CM11a and the PL in a way that TI102 family of devices don't ?
I don't cook bagels, but coffee and home-baked bread are available -- assuming that your transporter is compatible with RS-232802(MING).
... Marc Marc_F_Hult
Do you know why they are leaving X10? Too many "it don't work all the time" complaints?
For you and me, yes. For the casual hobby user, no. These converters are usually north of $50 which is past the pain threshold of a typical home user for stuff that's needed "just to make it work". They are also not available in local stores, those only offer USB-Parallel and even they might vanish soon.
Agree. Unfortunately the PC industry doesn't :-(
The transceiver would need to be plugged into the XTB receptacle, not into the powerline side.
Ok, maybe a beer then :-)
Single port USB->RS232 adapters typically run $10-$20 online. Granted, some local stores like CompUSA and BestBuy may sell "branded" units like Belkin (bleah) at 3X-5X higher prices.
Yes and no.
The LM14A 2-way lamp module reports the brightness level setting and whether or not the lamp is actually connected. The information is contained in the Extended Code Status Ack.
The AM14A Appliance Module is supposed to report whether of not the load is connected, but is buggy and (almost) always reports that the load is connected when it's not.
Last time I was at Best Buy they said they don't have that :-(
And Wallmart and others import cheap CFLs made in China by manufacturers who neither know nor care about such niceties as FCC requirements (not that most FCC commissioners give a fig about technical issues these days).
Which makes it uneconomical to add an FTDI or SiliconLabs USB-serial chip internally to embedded devices. It costs nearly as much as the external adapter.
| The AM14A Appliance Module is supposed to report whether of not | the load is connected, but is buggy and (almost) always reports | that the load is connected when it's not.
You know that the AM14A can determine whether the load is connected only when the relay is off, right?
Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com
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