Home Automation
The smart home — powered by vBuildings.
The smart home market is finally upon us, driven by energy scarcity, advanced utility services, and consumers' awareness that they, too, can play a significant role in global climate change. And it's powered by vBuildings.
vBuildings is building a smart home ecosystem around the Digital Home Alliance, a like-minded group of companies intent on bringing the promised value of home control to a worldwide market. We started this process by equipping millions of homes around the world with some type of vBuildings-based control device, and new home products are being introduced every month. Typical energy awareness applications include:
- Appliances
- Air conditioning, humidity control, and heating equipment
- Lights
- Home theater systems
- Security, gas detection, and life/safety devices
- Pool and spa controls
- Irrigation equipment
- Energy measurement and load control devices
While the Digital Home Alliance is all about value to consumers, the fundamental technology makes it possible. We offer a wide range of hardware, software, and reference designs to help cost-effectively and reliably add control networking to a variety of home devices. Here are some of our recent advancements that are enabling the home control market:
Power Line Signaling: Networking Everything that Uses Electricity
If a device has a line cord or is otherwise connected to an electric power source, then it's a candidate for our power line signaling technology.
The same wires that carry electric power to a device can also be used to send control networking information. Now in its fifth generation, our power line products provide a highly reliable, low-cost way to communicate over virtually any existing AC and DC power circuit. In fact, our technology is so reliable that it's an international standard for power line signaling. Millions of devices that use our power line technology are in operation today.
Interoperable Self-Installation: The Devices Do All the Work
Developed by vBuildings in concert with appliance manufacturers, Interoperable Self-Installation (ISI) lets home devices automatically self-organize into a fully functioning control network — without the use of any specialized tools.
Consumers simply turn on a device — and in some cases, press a button — and the device starts working with other home devices. This means consumers with no technical skills can buy ISI-based products from different manufacturers and easily get them to work together. ISI, for the first time, makes it feasible for manufacturers to build mass-market home control products that consumers can install themselves. Home automation will never be the same.
Gateways to the World
Many consumers want to use their home computer, especially their MediaCenter PCs and Macintoshes, as a user interface to control their homes. Many utilities and telecommunication companies want to let their customers monitor and control their homes over the Internet, using a home gateway as a portal to the home.
We have solutions for both. Our LonBridge software leverages over 15 years of creating inteoperability standards and our ISI protocol. The result is that homeowners will soon be able to use their favorite screens — TVs, PCs, even iPods w/WiFi capabilities — to manage their homes.