XTB - the Future of X10 has arrived!

25 analog inputs, read at 4 times/second when there's a change up to 5 analog outputs, each updated once while that AI updates

Check 8 doors, once every second sample room temmperatures of 15 rooms, once every 5 minutes control 5 dampers, also at 5 minutes.

I dunno, I'm just making stuff up. However, when you've got a 2 ghz processor instead of a 50 line/second BASIC interpreter, you're going to come up with more stuff.

Reply to
AZ Nomad
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baud is signal changes per second and with X10, 60 baud == 60 bps. Of course there's overhead for start/stop bits, parity, etc.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

That's an easy one. Just get a two-way wall switch or module. They'll remember the state last dimmed to and without any of the flash problems.

But that's not and ideal solution. I'm working on a more elegant one for my Mom and Dad who need more than a dimmed bulb hallway bulb. I am looking at installing LED or similar "carpet lights" that you see in theaters and airplanes. It's clear that in low light, with dark adapted-eyes, a series of small lamps illuminating the pathway is the proper way to go. Those on one unit code, the regular lights on another and a way to tell when it's dark or light and it's done. It's not a challenge for X-10 because there's no dimming involved. They come on when they sense motion, they go off after a while or when the bed sensor says "back in bed."

I'm probably going to end up using Christmas lights because I love COTS solutions and there's nothing cheaper or that requires less labor. Concealing them artfully will be the only issue.

One could turn that statement right around and say "methinks you want this NOT to work so badly that you don't see how well it CAN work." (-:

It just takes a little effort. It's not brain surgery. I've solved the problems that could be solved by reading here and doing research through Google. I've worked around the rest. Now the XTB will allow me to eliminate a lot of compromises and really embrace a centralized controller. No matter what I tried before, the CM11A and the TW523 could not reach every corner of the house. Now they can. That's a big, big change in the whole design of my system.

It's a good time for it, too, because the mini-ITC PCs have proven themselves to be very capable and reliable. They'll make better controllers for far less $ than many of the hardwired panels out there.

The XTB has made the formerly inaccessible design path of a powerful central controller open to me again and really has reclaimed the value of my X-10 system. That's going to save me a ton of money and let me "wait it out" until one of the new protocols (or something even newer) prevails.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

I converted from mostly Leviton's latest line of switches, a few Smarthome switches and some plain old Appliance and Lamp Modules. The Leviton switches were never so great - I like the Smarthome ones better but they came out after the house was done 4 years ago. At least I had the soft start dimming and the other nice features.

Unless you program large scenes there is really no need to to use the V2 switches since the ICONs do most everything for half the price. The one thing they say it doesn't have, adjustable on and off ramping, is wrong. They DO have it and it works just like the the V2s. They just don't tell you about it. As one who joined their development group, I was extended a one time discount on the V2 stuff that made it the same price as the ICONs so I now have mostly V2s which do have prettier lights. Had they not offered the discounts I would have all ICONs.

Reply to
BruceR

Each and every newsgroup I've visited suffers from those "recurring issues." Having "favorites" is human nature and it's likely not to disappear from the behavioral characteristics of Usenetters any time soon. I probably wouldn't have to look very hard to make the very same claims about you that you're making about others. People elide information from their posts that tend not to support their contentions. People repeat inaccurate information as if it gained the power of truth by simple repetition. Such has been the nature of human discourse since long before Plato. We do it subconsciously, I am sure.

Your concern about comments made "at the expense of accuracy" U-turns very well to rest on your own shoulders. I assume your "hard to spend anything like $2000" comment is at least partially predicated on mine that to switch to another protocol and system would cost me $2000. (It could be you chose the $2000 number completely by chance and his has nothing to do with my comments. If so, accept my apologies.)

If your comment was to challenge to my assumption that it would cost *me* $2K to changeover, the truth is I could spend that in a heartbeat on some of the wired automation systems I've been looking at. You're subconsciously "playing your favorite" - which seems to be Insteon - without thinking about whether I was even talking about that protocol or something else entirely.

I don't think I will be using PLC in the next system I install. Why? Because there's no guarantee that 10 years from now Insteon won't face issues similar to X-10 as the environment and powerline next noisier and more complex. The only way to beat that is to go hard wired.

That brings to the surface another apparently erroneous assumption: that all the average large X-10 user possesses is a couple of dozen WS467's and that's all we'll need to convert. Highly inaccurate. It's pretty easy to not get things right because of incorrect foundational assumptions? We all do it, even we perfekt people. :-)

I know pretty much to the dollar what my X-10 installation is worth and what it would cost to replace it. Unless you know electricians that work for free, I suggest that $2000K is a *very* conservative estimate of switchover cost. It assumes no pigtails break off in the boxes (it's happened twice so it's probably going to happen again and it's the bitch of the century!!!). It assumes all goes well and it's a simple switch in and out. In fact, it assumes all sorts of things not entered into evidence that are contrary to my experience, as well as the posted experience of others.

Bruce said he spent $1000+ doing the conversion and that was at a "good buddy/great deal" price. He's retained a Stargate from his previous setup that I recall him saying would cost another $1000 to replace. So your assumption anyone would be "hard pressed" to spend $2000 ripping out an X-10 system is in reality "hard pressed" to survive in the face of challenges from both my inventory valuation and projected electrician costs and Bruce's actual experience switching away from X-10.

Allow me to break out your remaining comments one by one about what my spending from ?$ to $5K will allow me "to enjoy" [with my replies in straight brackets like this]:

a) tactile response [Not great but not worth $2000 to improve]

b) visual aesthetics [Not great but not worth $2000 to improve]

c) possibly better hash filtering [I'm not going to pull X10 for that!]

d) probably longevity of the hardware (my WS 467's fail with appalling regularity) [At the X-10 price, so what? But I challenge your longevity estimate with the fact that I still have old paddle style switches that work just fine. I also counter with the many reports of defective Smarthome gear that had to be returned, often more than once, for refurbishing or repair. Maybe your electrical power isn't well-regulated or you hooked up the WS467 switches backwards. They do have differently colored wires and since I began paying attention to hooking them up as directed in the instruction sheets, I've had no more failures. I freely admit that I did experience several failures with the original X-10 wall switches. I changed to Stanley switches, which I got for $3 each at closeout, and for whatever reason, none have failed. That means at least 5 years without a single switch failure. I've had perhaps 4 controllers go flaky, as well as a few other items but the replacement cost and bother is really just noise.]

e) freedom from interdevice interference [Only time will tell!]

f) lack of start-up flash when dimming [No issue for X-10 2-way lamp modules and wall switches]

g) accurate dim levels [Oh come on, who REALLY cares? OK, maybe some HA supergeeks do but we don't even dim our lights so why would we care?]

h) ability to logically gang switches [I can electronically "gang" them by using the same unit codes. ALL ON/OFF is all the ganging I really need.]

i) and so on.

Well, sorry, Marc, nothing so far has convinced me I need to leave X10. In the interests of accuracy, the flashing dimmer problem only affects the $5 lamp modules. Spend a little more, get a little more - if you need it.

Now, let's look, as objectively as I can, at my side of the equation (although I've listed these items a number of times before).

a) I save money - lots of money, by not converting. I say it's $2000+ and since it's my setup, you'll have to agree that it's highly likely I know more about what I own than you do. Could it be that you're failing to assess a fair market value to the cost of an electrician (or my time) to perform the switchover? $5K is more like what the new system will really cost, but since it will be in a new house, it's not as onerous as making the change now would be. Doing the upgrade at that time it becomes a case of "I had to install a new system anyway." It's really the only time when installing a hardwired system is truly feasible, at least IMHO.

b) I save lots of time and effort not learning new software and hardware interfaces. I don't have to scour the web looking for shareware apps to enroll all my modules. I don't have to run all sorts of beta software for all the new hardware I didn't buy, either. This is one of the reasons that there's not so much HA discussion in CHA these days. Anyone who wanted to automate did, and in their own ways. So there's lots less to talk about than there was in the beginning when the really smart people were still finding their way. Sadly, in CHA, we often end up chewing on the same old bones.

c) I have testers and other tools for X-10 that don't even seem to EXIST yet for other protocols.

d) I have an ever-growing amount of experience in dealing with X-10's foibles that makes new problems much easier to solve than they used to be when X-10 was new to me.

e) I can get new X-10 equipment dirt cheap as Ebay sellers panic and dump their stock, probably assuming Insteon's going to kill the X-10 market. That means I can go very, very deep in spares for very little money.

f) There's a plethora of equipment that exists for X-10 that's apparently not going to be available for other platforms for a long time, if ever. Phone controllers, universal modules, universal remotes, Robdogs, Sundowners, etc. If I convert, I lose mucho functionality and gain things (like accurate dim levels) that I don't give a whit about. Where's the logic in that?

g) I get to postpone what protocol I would like to change to until the wars are over and a winner emerges. There's no guarantee that Smarthome will be around for ever. I remember when the well-capitalized Cybergenie phone makers went bankrupt. Here one day, gone the next and the only spares are what's out in the market already. Their intellectual property went into deep freeze along with all remaining stock - that got sold a few years later when its value had all but vanished.

I'm sorry if that point-by-point breakdown still sounds like some partisan boosterism. I've tried to make it as logical a requirements and systems analysis as I could, and it really pertains only to me. I don't like X-10 for emotional reasons, as partisanship might imply. I like it because it gets the job done as cheaply as possible, leaving me money to spend on other things. That's important to both me and the exchequer, my wife.

I'm with Bob Bass on this one. Smarthome violates the "eggs in one basket" rule for me, at least for now. Plus, I've never had an X-10 appliance or lamp module codewheel reset to A1 but it seems to be a popular pastime for at least some Smarthome products. Admittedly, that's based solely on the number of posts I've seen along the lines of "my X-linc loses its address" and not direct experience. But it came from people I know to be reliable in at least same cases.

Yes, once again undermining my own points, I find the X-10's MD and keychain controllers are notorious for resetting to A1, too, but there are workarounds for that, too. I am in no hurry to switch anymore, now that the XTB has arrived. For me, avoiding an upgrade that saves me lots of time, effort and money is a "change in the way I live and work." That's why I am so effusive about the XTB and why I think some of the other 5 million X-10 users will be as well.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

So, that can be done with an Ocelot and some $80 relay modules. It's basically an X-10 compatible device. That's the beauty of X-10. It allows the very simple integration of hardwiring and high speed where you need it but doesn't make you pay for it where you don't. You don't need high speed bandwidth to switch lights on and off although you made need it to analyze inputs.

Lots of people have designed their X-10 just as I have described and are quite thankful you can get a load controller on sale for less than $5. No one else can touch that. It leaves lots of extra money for hardwired PIRs, Ocelots and other goodies, if you need them. With the signal strength problems squelched by the XTB, X-10 has taken on a very new life. I think that's just the first of some very interesting X-10 gear we'll see from Jeff.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Right. I'll definitely do that. I've hardly been home the last few days.

That would be great, but I can't. As I mentioned before, there are two motion sensors. Due to the shape of the room, a single one couldn't always see me no matter where I put it. I did originally try that. One of them would send an off while I was still in there. Lights would go on and off. Also, what I didn't mention is that the basement is wired with only pull string fixtures, so I'm using screw in modules. No way to plug them into the transceiver. (I plugged in a utility light for the original experiment.)

Reply to
Larry Moss

To the landfill they go - or maybe Ebay!

That would be very nice. I live in plaster and lathe - RF tends to "stovepipe" in that it passes easily from floor to floor (wood only) but not from room to room (the wire lathe).

Interesting. I will be powering it up as soon as I can find the coax required to make the connection. IIRC, RG59 and RG6 had the wrong impedance. I should be looking for 50 Ohm cable to use with the BX-AHT and your "eggbeater" antenna design, correct?

That's the big round sucker, right? The Robodog comes with a similar version but alas, it too got squirrel happy. It might even be the reason I got married - my then GF got such a kick out of the fact that an electric dog would bark at real birds and squirrels.

Why do you prefer the door/window switches?

That's a reasonable choice. With a viable whole house controller I can create my own "select your own house code" option via an Ocelot translating codes I enter and using an escape sequence so the the requirement of a more configureable AHT has slackened somewhat. Thanks for thinking about it, anyway. The discussion alone cleared up some misconceptions I had about the way the remote actually worked. I somehow expected it to output RF as well as IR for every button press simultaneously.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

I've done this in places where the application really is that simple. My garage has one sensor and one overhead light, so it makes sense. I wish I had logging capability, but it's not that important. But I do need multiple sensors in the basement to make it work.

Reply to
Larry Moss

So, if I follow correctly you're using a different housecode so that you can have the computer decide when to turn off the lights, not the motion detector. I recall seeing a mod that made the PIR MD's only send ONs on every motion detected but never an off.

I believe you can get around this by doing the following. Set the timers on both MD's to the maximum. That why, the off can be issue by the controlling software X minutes after it's seen the last on or when it detects that you've moved to a different room or whatever.

Can you trace the wire going to the lights and find an outlet to plug the transceiver into that's on the same branch? The close the sender is to the receiver, the fewer transmission problems you'll have.

Did turning off the log have an effect on the overall speed?

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Correct.

That would be very helpful if anyone has any pointers.

That makes sense. Off the top of my head, I don't know what the max is and if it would ever be a problem. Probably not.

Yes. This isn't a problem.

I didn't actually turn it off, but since I log a message both before and after the light on command is sent, I can see that's not slowing things down. (I can try it anyway just to be absolutely sure, but I'm not expecting anything there.) I really need to do what Dave suggested and watch the ESM1. TOday is going to be another insane day that I don't really get to be home.

Reply to
Larry Moss

Yes.

No.

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There's more room inside the case for mounting a small daughterboard with a PIC on it.

You really haven't grasped yet what you can do with the BX24-AHT. The advantage of using the ZX-24 was that it's software UARTs are always active in the background so it can deal with multiple, simultaneous I/O streams. The configurability enhancements are not major.

Reply to
Dave Houston

Two-way x-10 modules and switches cost ~$30 and up. An INSTEON ICON wall switch is $19.99 Why recommend getting something new that costs more and does less or worse? Not Either/Or. Get it?

Touché ! ... or should we say "touchy" ? ;-)

Waiting for (eg) INSTEON's many bugs to be addressed is especially appropriate for folks that aren't making a clean install of all (eg) INSTEON. The firmware on most (eg) INSTEON switches and devices is not field upgradeable, so there will be more than a bit of trauma involved for the early adopters who will find that the recommended solution to many of the current issues will be to replace all their hardware (Sound familiar ?).

'Course if we had waited until x-10 got all its bugs we would have missed out on all the fun over the years -- not to mention the wrath of SO's when the lights inexplicably went on at 3AM ...

controllers for far less $ than many of the hardwired panels out there.

"Far less $ " ??? The mini-itx that Homeseer sells with its software installed -- only through distributors that will provide support -- costs about ~2700. This is all about the cost of support, and next to nothing about the cost of hardware which you seem to assume.

Also, if one steps away from the hypothetical to the actual, reality is that hardwired panels provide secure, systematic hardware I/O connections and connectors in an appropriate enclosure. This is critical. If you look at (eg) the $2700 Mini-Itx Homeseer sells for their software, it has none of those needed features. It connects to other pc-centric hardware, not home wiring. This is/was also part of the Elk MM443-Ocelot comparison that folks with no hands-on experience could never grok. The physical installation is critical -- not jist the smarts.

My experience with mini-ITX is limited to the three VIA mini-itx's I own including one diskless, fanless running XPe off a compact flash that I purchased on eBay for $100. Another runs MS Server 2003. The third is in the junk box awaiting an assignment or recycling through eBay. Yes they are neat. No they are not a cheap panacea IME.

The original fanless 5000 and the new AN and CN-series

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at the ragged edge of what the current version of Power Over Ethernet (POE) can provide (~15watts). Mini-ITX will become even more popular when the new POE standard supplying 30 watts+ is adopted. Adoption of distributed and scavenged DC power will change the HA landscape considerably. Banish wall warts.

... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc F Hult

snipped-for-privacy@whocares.com (Dave Houston) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@nntp.fuse.net:

Is there a way to use that w/o the security system? Iow, I would like to use it in place of a Eagle/HawkEye. Is that possible?

-Scott

Reply to
Scott Hughes

Strictly speaking, you're right. In reality, baud's only meaningful in discussion of old modems and teletypes. Once you go past 2400 bit/s, baud is no longer the same thing, at least in modems. Since we were discussing both the old and new transmission protocols, ethernet, etc. the correct common denominator is bit/s.

This discussion makes me wonder if it might be possible for a bright guy like Jeff or Dave to take the 60 cycles offered by the powerline and multiplex them so that each cycle (baud) carried a greater number of bit/s. The old X-10 equipment would see only the old X-10 signals and the new protocol could use the extra capacity to significantly increase the bandwidth. That's exactly how they bumped those 2400 "baud" modems up to

56Kbit/s eventually.

I remember Byte magazine articles that talked about the theoretical limits of copper phone lines and how we would all have to use fiber to get even cable modem speeds. And yet year after year modems over POTS got faster and faster. Now you can get 1.5Mb/s with copper and DSL. I'm betting that X-10 can be similarly extended and enhanced - maintaining backwards compatibility and incorporating fallback capability. That all happened with PC modems. X-10's not that much different in concept.

Jeff's XTB invention convinces me that there's still a lot of life left both on the powerline and in the X-10 protocol. He's cut away at the primary weakness of X-10: signal loss. I'll bet he could bring some interesting ideas to bear on an enhanced X-10 spec that was truly backward compatible with older gear. It would answer your legitimate gripe that X-10's too slow and would really extend the life of the installations of millions of users.

People would use high speed modules for macro execution and low speed, cheap mass produced modules for everything else. Yet when you sent an "ALL OFF" from an old-style controller, it would turn off all modules, old and new. Just like company intranets, you put the high priced high speed network gear on backbones and on the PCs of those most in need of high speed. I'll even bet Dave's got some of the technical details of such a protocol extension worked out as byproduct of his work on Rozetta.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Bobby will use it with a BX24-AHT (discontinued) which can receive the security RF codes.

Reply to
Dave Houston

Been there, done that, got HomePlug.

Well, actually I don't "got HomePlug" because it still costs too much compared to 802.11G so I opted for 802.11G to add a new laptop to my LAN, but BPL and HomePlug do with the powerlines what the modems and DSL do over phone lines.

I believe HomePlug has approved a newer, lower bit rate version intended for HA type tasks. Its cost and reliability are still to be determined.

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Yitran whose technology was chosen already has chipsets that use Microsoft's free SCP protocol.

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As I've noted before, it surprises me that X10 hasn't devel>This discussion makes me wonder if it might be possible for a bright guy

Reply to
Dave Houston

I agree.

Well I wouldn't be quite so quick to make that assumption.

For years I have used a X-10 Appliance module to turn my Christmas tree's sub miniature light strings on and off successfully. I did this so I did not have to get down on the floor to plug or unplug them. I don't have a switched outlet within 30 feet. I changed over to the LED strings last Christmas, to save wattage and the X10 appliance would not turn off the 5 strings of 50 each bulbs. They just dimmed about 50%.

Same problem as CFL lights, the 6 strings only draw 42 W total at full brightness. The leakage current the X10 module uses to test if an appliance is turned on or off, is enough to give about 50 % of the normal light from all of the LED lights. I used them anyway and just accepted the daily 0.67 kWh * $0.08199/kWh cost = $0.05513 cost of operation each day.

I am still using 1 string of 35 white LED christmas bulbs to illuminate a path in our house. Our dog has decided that path is his bed. He is an 120 pound Akita, and does a damn good job of blocking that path from our bedroom to one of the bathrooms. Unfortunately he is mostly the same color as the carpet, a very sound sleeper, and while he does not seem to object to being stepped on, neither my wife nor I care to fall over him.

Ergo, we needed a night light for the whole hall, and the LEDs hung on adhesive cup hooks at the ceiling provide an unobtrusive ghostly light. I am planning to drop the existing cornice trim about a half an inch and then lay the light string behind the cornice and put a outlet and J-box at one end. I will wire that to an existing attic light switch and replace the existing attic lights with CFLs at the same time. (At least I will know if someone has left the attic lights on!)

Reply to
Jim Baber

snipped-for-privacy@whocares.com (Dave Houston) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@nntp.fuse.net:

I don't have one of those or the expertise/knowledge to build one myself (looks like it was something you designed/built?). Is that the only way to make use of those motion sensors outside of the x10 security system?

-Scott

Reply to
Scott Hughes

I currently use a smarthome powerlinc serial controller

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connected to a PC as the central controller for my x10 installation. From what i'm reading about XTB, it sounds like it would really help the powerlinc get its signals to some of my devices that i have trouble controlling, but what i'm wondering is would the XTB interfere with the reception of signals by the powerlinc? or improve it? or it has no impact on reception of signals by devices plugged into it?

I'd love to improve my transmission strength, but i also need the powerlinc to receive signals from a number of transceivers throughout my house for using motion detectors/etc, so i need to know that that won't be a problem.

Thanks.

Reply to
ben.parees

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