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 […]
Case Study: Providing a KNX Infrastructure within a Listed Building – Part 2
By Ben Lewis, KNX Consultants. This three-part series covers the practicalities of controlling the lighting and heating in our headquarters, and monitoring our energy consumption, all using KNX. The building is a 17th-century Grade II listed former dovecote, and is located in Staunton, Gloucestershire, UK. In part 1, we looked at the installation of KNX-based […]
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 […]
Trade Talk: Shade Control – the most underspecified aspect of the KNX smart home
By Sophie Thomas, Ivory Egg. The nights are beginning to draw in again, and the clocks will soon be changing. Rather than feeling down, we can focus on the positives: KNX installations around the world will be effortlessly switching external lights on automatically at dusk, just that bit earlier, and the heating will begin to […]
Best Practice: The Changing Use of the User Interface
By Simon Buddle, Future Ready Homes. Many moons have passed overhead since I programmed my first user interface. Full of joy that I had managed to program a button to turn on the lights, a small LED to the button’s right informed me that I had been successful. That night, I told my girlfriend of […]
Interview: Tim Robbins, My KNX Store – The Advantages of Becoming KNX-Certified
KNX is becoming more widely used in homes and businesses across the world, but in some countries, such as the UK, KNX is still relatively unknown. In order to better understand the advantages of being involved with the technology, we asked certified KNX trainer, Tim Robbins of My KNX Store, about what being KNX certified […]