Business: When will KNX and Consumer Electronics Converge?
By Jesús Arias García, KNXin. It is inevitable that building control systems and technologies from the professional and consumer markets are going to converge. Indeed we can see this happening already with the eruption of iPads and tablets into the professional visualisation market. After all, who is going to pay 1200 Euros for an outdated […]
How to Solve It: Manually Adding Group Addresses to the Filter Table
By Miguel José Gamboa Soares, EURODOMÓTICA. The Problem More and more KNX supervision software packages use KNXnet/IP for connection to a KNX network. For this reason ETS does not have KNX equipment with the necessary group objects to link to a group address. The consequence is that you have to create the necessary filter tables […]
Country Profile: KNX USA
By David Thurow, Siemens. It has taken a long time, but finally the US market is ready for KNX, and KNX is ready for the US market. Until now, there have been eight major commercial lighting control manufacturers and more than a dozen regional and start-up companies in the US. Each manufacturer has its own […]
Best Practice: Panel Power
By Simon Buddle, Future Ready Homes. It is pretty dull when you get called out over the weekend and travel to site only to find out that a breaker has tripped in the electrical consumer unit. But it is not nearly as dull as when it hasn’t tripped and something in the panel has been […]
Going Green: Low-Cost KNX and Emerging Countries
By Jesús Arias García, KNXin. Many people in the industry will not agree with the sentiment of this title, but two things happened to me over the past few weeks that made me reflect on this subject. Prepaid Electricity Meter Like the vast majority of the houses in South Africa, I had a prepaid electricity […]
Trade Talk: Security is a Big Deal
By Sophie Thomas, Ivory Egg. Homeowners are more conscious now than ever about their home, their families and their belongings remaining safe. And rightly so. In the age of smart technology and the Internet of Things, is a smart home more secure than a traditional home, or does it add its own level of concern? […]
How to Solve it: Motion and Presence Detection in a Bypass Situation
By Jan Magnus, EIBKon BVBA. The Problem Imagine a private home in which lights are switched on using motion detection, but they should be kept on for cleaning purposes. Working in parallel on the binary output of the motion detector using the same group address works, but it fails when somebody walks through the detection […]
Shake my KNX – a new experience in the world of building control
By Gwenaël Leroutier, Hager. KNX is often hailed as being the most versatile building control standard in the world, and indeed the reach of KNX often extends beyond buildings into other applications. We wanted to show the true strengths of the standard through a competition based on ‘hackathons’ – events in which programmers meet to […]
How to Solve it: Synchronising the Status-LED of Wall Switches and Lighting Channels
By Héctor Colado, Amaisys Training. The Problem In an automated facility, it is very common to have wall switches with an integrated status-LED for every button. The status-LED is often used to show the current status of an associated light channel, or, more commonly, to show the inverted status of the light channel, in order […]
Going Green: Green Buildings, Energy Efficiency and Legislation
By Jesús Arias García, KNXin. Nikola Tesla, one of the most prolific engineers of our time and father of alternating current, was a fan of renewable energy. His new and state-of-the-art technology spawned the modern city, and was responsible for one of civilization’s milestones: the first-ever hydraulic power plant. Powered by the Niagara Falls, this […]