When I was a student, I worked on a little home automation project, it was part of a partnership between my school as the company. We were 5 five on the project and I was doing the core gateway. It was relying on the OSGi framework, I built some bundles (the OSGi way). AND…

The most frustration thing we encountered is that we couldn’t find by that time any cheap and reliable home automation system. I did a lot of searches but the only cheap and reliable systems (and more specifically protocols) that we could find where Z-Wave and Insteon. But both of them where only available in the US and couldn’t be used in France because of the electrical system (110V 60Hz instead of 220V 50Hz here) and the unlicensed radio frequencies (443 Mhz instead of 800 Mhz here).

AND…

I recently discovered that there are finally some Z-Wave product that can work in France. So, I bought a light dimmer, a remote controller and a USB controller on planete-domotique.com. I haven’t tested it yet but

I guess that’s not as cool as if I had ordered an iPad but I intend to cure my lack of coolness someday not very soon.

By the way, I’m still updating this blog by SVN and the admin interface and as you can see from the footer, WordPress 3.0 is now in Beta and a lot of people (mostly chinese) have already tried it. I guess the final version will be released pretty soon. I won’t see the difference, but I’m pretty sure you will. One of the new feature I like is the possibility to upgrade every plugins at once (like you do on the iPhone). It’s very convenient.

    • *Short version for all the non english-speaking french guys :

Quand j’étais étudiant, j’ai travaillé avec 4 autres étudiants et une entreprise sur un projet de domotique. Le plus frustrant dans ce projet a été l’absence de protocole domotique peu coûteux et fiable. Aux US, il existe Z-Wave et Insteon mais en France ces protocoles ne sont pas supportés du fait des différences de normes électriques et de législations autour des fréquences libres de transmission radio.

ET DONC…

J’ai découvert récemment que maintenant des produits Z-Wave étaient dispo en France. J’ai acheté sur planete-domotique.com :