A lot of people here the phrase home automation and conjure up images of walking into this futuristic home with lights coming on automagically or clapping their hands and soothing music enveloping their home with vibrant sounds, well all of this is true plus a whole lot more. Home automation is without question the way of the future for the way we live and interact with our homes and everything in it from the lights and appliances to our home security systems. Before we get started let me qualify myself and let you know why you should listen to me on this subject.
My name is Tyrone Robertson, I am a master electrician and I have been working in the electrical field for 33+ years and in the industrial automation field for over 20 years. As far as industrial automation goes I have worked with everything from PLC (programmable logic controller) based systems to robotics, servo controlled systems, VFD’S (variable frequency drives) and everything in between. I am not going to try to explain everything I stated in the last sentence to you, for that is a subject and an article all to itself probably for a whole different audience but let me just say that I am considered by those in the field of automation an expert. So hopefully I have established that I know a thing or two about home automation and what I tell you guys can be trusted.
Let us begin by taking a look at automation in its pure form and then we will go from there. So in its basic form a home automation or in other terms a control system is made up out of 4 parts:
- The controller (the brains of the system)
- Inputs
- Outputs
- Field devices
Ok now that we know the basic components that make up a home automation system we will go over each one and I will give you a basic overview of what that component does and how it interacts with the control system as a whole. Just a quick note before I proceed, I will be going into dept somewhat on each component but I will do my best to keep it as simple as possible to both not make this super complicated but to also keep the article enjoyable, with all that out of the way lets begin!
The Controller
Every home automation system has some type of controller that literally controls all the actions of the system or devices that is being controlled. The controller is fitted with some type of CPU (central processing unit) that runs software that analyzes all the information that it receives and makes some type of decision and executes some type of action based on that information. Lets look at a basic example of what that looks like in the real world, we will use an amazon Alexa and a light being turned on in your family room as an example. We tell Alexa to turn on the family room lights and through a voice activated command Alexa looks at a piece of programming that we created through either voice command or an app that tells Alexa to send a Wireless signal to a device that we have our family room lights plugged into and like magic the lights come on! We tell Alexa to turn off the family room lights and of course as we would expect the lights turn off. So let’s go back to the beginning of the article when I told you that every home automation system is composed of 4 parts, the controller, inputs, outputs, and field devices. In the above situation the controller is Alexa, the input is our voice command, the output is the device we plug our light into, and the field device is our family room lights. I could go into much more detail about controllers and how they work, the different types of controllers and so on but in the spirit of keeping this article as simple and understandable as I can I will refrain from letting my inner geek come out, so I will move on to the next section.
Inputs devices
Input devices are a very important part of any control system, It is through these input devices or commands that our controller receive the information that it needs to make a decision and send an output command. Input devices come in all shapes and sizes and is only limited be the imagination of the engineer that design them. An input device can be defined as anything that sends a signal to the controller and I emphasize TO the controller. Lets look at a few examples of an input device: Switches, an icon that you touch on your smart phone or iPad, your voice command, a magnetic switch or glass break detector on your window, a motion detector mounted on the wall this is just to name a few. The one thing that all of these devices have in common is that the end result is the device generating and sending a signal of some type to the controller. So to wrap up input devices, anything that effectively sends a signal to the controller can be considered an input.
Output devices
Output devices like input devices are an integral part of any home automation system, and it is trough these devices that our controller is able to send signals to the real world and effectively control all of our devices. As we learned earlier input devices send signals to the controller, output devices on the other hand send signals they receive from the controller to our field devices. Just like input devices output devices come in all shapes and sizes and is only limited by the imagination of the person who created them. Some examples of output devices would be AC or DC output cards, relays, Wireless controlled output devices and many others. The one thing that all of the aforementioned devices have in common is that they are all designed to receive some type of signal and upon doing so perform some type of action. The only thing that you need to remember here is that output devices are actuated (turned on or off) by the controller, so you could say and you would be correct that the controller controls the outputs and hence manipulate things in the real world. So to wrap up outputs and I do not mean to be redundant, they are the devices in our home automation system that are directly controlled by the controller and in turn control all the devices in our home.
Field devices
Last but not least we have our actual field devices, this is the part that you guys will be familiar with because these are the things that we use everyday. Any home automation or control systems primary goal is to take the human element or action out of some type of redundant task that we perform on a regular basis and replace it with some type of subroutine or in other words automate the task. We used an example above with Alexa performing a simple function of turning some lights on and off, in reality we can apply the same concept to anything in our home that has electricity running to it! So hopefully you can see that a field device can be anything in your home that has power running to it! Yup if it’s plugged in or run to your panel box we can control it through some type of automation, as a matter of fact with the advent of Z Wave and ZigBee wireless mesh protocols (read the article for Z-Wave vs ZigBee) we can integrate our home security, garage door openers, even our door locks. It’s a pretty amazing time for us and as certain technologies mature incorporating home automation is becoming easier.
Well I hope I did not bore you guys to death but I wanted to make sure you had a good basic understanding of how home automation works under the hood. When you go to set up your system the overall picture that you have been given will allow you to understand everything that is taking place thus giving you the ability to be a little bit more creative when you start planning out your system and how you want it to work. In future articles I will be writing about some of the diy home automation systems on the market that pretty much any home owner can install and immediately reap the benefits of home automation, so say stay tuned and if you enjoyed this article please hit the like button and share it with you friends.
