Trade Talk: Wired Versus Wireless
By Sophie Thomas, Ivory Egg. 2014 saw a tremendous surge in innovation and interest in smart homes, mainly thanks to simple, easy-to-use wireless solutions. This has raised eyebrows within our industry as the burgeoning DIY sector starts to flex its muscles. The conflict stems from the perceived ease of installation of some of these wireless […]
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 After all, who is going to pay 1200 Euros for an outdated […]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 […]
Case Study: Providing a KNX Infrastructure within a Listed Building – Part 3
By Ben Lewis, KNX Consultants. In this three-part series, we have been covering a KNX installation in our headquarters based in a 17th-century Grade II listed former dovecote, located in Staunton, Gloucestershire, UK. Whilst this has been implemented within a relatively small office, the key message is that this type of installation can be applied […]
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 […]