The Sunday New York Times has some nice introductory material on smart homes. They skate quickly be prices to devices and the smart grid. They write about putting the homeowner in control. They even show several home panels.
With only one screenshot, I cannot comment on the systems described. One looks more like a home theater console with a dishwasher added. Another allows scheduling of building systems, but gives no sign of interaction with and feedback from the power
Read MoreBasics
Service enabling Telecommunications – lessons for Buildings and Grid
Peter Carbone, Vice President of SOA for Nortel, gave a nice high level talk at the OASIS conference on the challenges facing a company learning to dance in the world of SOA and mash-ups. Nortel, of course, grew up with rigid account control and vertical integration in a regulated environment. As markets for building systems are still characterized by rigid account control and vertical integration, and the power grid is still vertically integrated, regulated, and almost complete account control, there are some useful lessons.
Infrastructure convergence was the enabling and driving change for telecommunications. Provisioning telecommunications was long the most difficult task. Over the last decade, the diverse communication infrastructure ...
Read MoreHome Automation: Bad choices and poor experiences
in Basics, Smart Grid
My hydronic system failed this summer. It was time. Spare parts for the boiler, still more efficient than most on the market, are no longer available. It supported a hot water heater, and two zones in my old house. I am splitting out the water heater, moving to a tankless system. While the boilers haven’t gotten better, the price for a boiler almost as good has gone way down; the incentive to put everything on one boiler is gone.
Read MoreAbstract, yes, but which abstractions…
Building systems do not often produce useful information because they usually serve up concrete data, not abstract information.
Data is that annoying stream of consciousness woman who sat next to you on the bus. Now my arm itches. Look at that girls over there; didja ever see a dress like that. I have something in my shoe. That man is looking at me funny. My nose itches. I hope I don’t miss my stop. I wonder if the fish at the store will be fresh. The fish last week was not fresh. My bra is uncomfortable. You really can’t do much with data, unless you know a lot about its source.
Information conveys something that is actionable. This means that...