Yesterdays announcement that Google have arrived in the Home Automation world continues to make waves. This morning Engadget have got their hands on some of the wireless LED bulbs show in the demos and have revealed some interesting details about them.
Engadget also reports that the LED Bulb should retail for around $30 (which usually means at least £30 these days) and in addition there will be a light switch, security lamp plus a ‘wall wart’ which we assume will be wireless gateway from Wi-Fi devices to Android @ Home products.
Engadget are already touting the system as less expensive and easier to setup than exiting home automation products and they’re talking about Z-Wave and Zigbee systems, not high the end AMX’s and Crestron’s of this world…
this Google-led mesh networking solution — which beams out commands on the 900MHz frequency band — is the first HA solution that’s truly designed to be ultra-low-cost and easy to implement. Compared to Z-Wave and Zigbee, there’s far less technical expertise needed to start automating things in your home, and there’s no need to take out a second mortgage to open your garage door with your handset.”
Let us know what you think in the comments below.
www.android.com : Lighting Science : [Via Engadget]
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It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes someone to write a plugin for something like Homeseer…
I’m not desperately keen on all automation being driven online from Google’s servers – it would be no good if you couldn’t turn on your lights if your broadband went down! I really like the idea of Google momentum pushing through some de-facto standards though – something very lacking in HA at the moment. Also if you came to sell your house a load of *standard* HA goodies built-in it might be attractive (rather than home-grown stuff that a buyer couldn’t easily maintain).
Stewart,
The Harmony component for this is already on the dev plan!
I just need to get my hands on the hardware now, and hope my wish for 36 hour days comes true 🙂
I dont think that this android thing will cut ice in the market Unless the price of led bulbs will come down.People are still buying CFL because of low cost.
People are still buying incandescent because of the low cost.