New Gateway Bridges ZigBee Devices with Web Services

Back in 2003, Lutron demonstrated a UPnP-enabled light switch at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). Just plug it in, and the light bulb would appear in the "My Computer" menu, ready to be controlled via PC.

Nice idea, but the initiative never went anywhere, despite valiant efforts by Premise Systems, developer of the first and most ambitious IP-based home automation software. Premise, which debuted in 1999, had a huge marketing budget and the company had very close ties to Microsoft (Premise drove Microsoft's home automation demos at a few CES events). The startup company put a lot of faith in the emerging new protocol Universal Plug and Play (UPnP).

UPnP-enabled devices could be discovered and controlled by Premise software with very little effort. Non-UPnP devices would require customized drivers, which Premise wrote begrudgingly.

Premise worked hard to get the home-control industry interested in UPnP, and to create device definitions for lights, thermostats and other automation devices.

But our industry simply never bit.

Part II: Web Services for Devices

So, will our industry bite for Web Services for Devices (WSD)? Known in some circles as UPnP 2.0, WSD is expected to succeed where UPnP failed. Namely, it is more scalable, more secure, and more tightly integrated with the Internet. Plus, it's not entirely new -- it's a play on the original Web services used to connect business software across corporate networks and the Internet.

And it's got at least one big advocate in the home-automation industry: Exceptional Innovation. EI is banking on WSD like Premise did on UPnP. And EI is putting a ton of money into the effort. This time, it seems to be working.

EI's Lifeware software for home automation already exploits the Internet-oriented "services" associated with WSD. And it will exploit the "devices" when they become available. In the meantime, the company has created Lifelink, a module that essentially WSD-enables a noncompliant subsystem like a security system or thermostat.

These devices, then, can be discovered and controlled by Lifeware software and, presumably, other WSD-enabled controllers in the future, like Windows Vista PCs. (Premise did the same thing using IP bridges from Lantronix, which eventually bought the automation company).

But it's a whole lot easier if these system manufacturers build WSD into their own devices. So EI is on a grand mission to spread the gospel of WSD, especially to manufacturers whose products might be controlled by Lifeware.

So far, EI has demonstrated WSD-enabled lighting controls and security systems from Vantage and Digital Security Controls (DSC), respectively. LiteTouch and Lutron have WSD-enabled their lighting control systems via Lifelink.

At this year's WinHEC, EI engineers were busy teaching developers how to adopt WSD. And the efforts continue to pay off.

Zigbee/WSD Bridge

Archronix just announced a major milestone in the WSD effort: the ArcWay, a ZigBee – WSD Gateway. The gateway allows WSD-enabled controllers such as Lifeware and Windows Vista to communicate directly with ZigBee-compliant devices with no additional device drivers or setup.

ZigBee is the low-rate, two-way RF protocol for low-bandwidth applications like lighting and temperature control. In the home automation industry, versions of the protocol have been adopted by AMX, CentraLite, Control4, Crestron, Eaton, Vantage, Xantech and others.

For more information on the Zigbee/WSD gateway, download the technical paper, "Bridging the Automation/IP Gap," by Derek R. Flickinger.

EI's Sway

Of course, EI has not single-handedly been responsible for the emerging acceptance of WSD in the home controls market. But darn close!

The company has taken it upon itself to create descriptions (Web Services Description Language, or WSDL, in industry parlance) for categories related to home systems -- lights, climate, shades, multiroom audio, appliances, DVD players, TVs, and the like. "Our process is to bring in the top products in the major categories, create a WSDL that supports all of their core functionality," says EI's VP of marketing Mike Seamons.

"We offer these WSDLs to all our partners to utilize and will eventually offer them up to a standards body. We are flexible to evolve the WSDLs, but the flexibility of WSD is strong enough that you can have a full-featured lighting system utilize every capability, while a more basic system can use a subset of the same WSDL."

Go to any industry trade show, and you'll see how serious Exceptional Innovation is. They are devoting a lot of resources to this effort, and manufacturers are starting to take notice.

You can expect to see more WSD success stories in the massive EI booth at the Electronic House Expo, Nov. 15-17, Long Beach, Calif.

From the CEO

Seale Moorer founded Exceptional Innovation in 2004. For an interview that will appear in the December issue of CE Pro, we asked the CEO why Web Services for Devices is so important to the company's Lifeware automation software

Moorer: I wouldn't say WSD is important just to Lifeware. It's important to our industry. If we are going to achieve this vision of digital living that we're all talking about and writing white papers about and getting everyone all worked up about, then we have to have a reliable, robust and lightweight protocol to make convergence happen seamlessly, and right now, Web Services for Devices is the only game going.

WSD takes all of the great ideas that informed the creation of UPnP, but adds in the tremendous benefits of Web Services and five years of their development and refinement. We could have taken a lot of shortcuts in Lifeware -- hard coded device drivers and been done with it -- but we didn't. We built an elegant architecture that exposes non-WSD devices to the network as WSD devices. It's faster, much more stable and doesn't take a lot of computing power to get it done. When you see how Lifeware can dynamically discover an entire lighting system, for example, how we just pull in all that system programming and immediately put it to use, it's really amazing.

We're not the only ones talking about WSD, either. Major companies like HP and Microsoft see the benefits, and the fact that it's natively supported in Vista will bump its acceptance significantly. In our own industry, I can tell you this -- when we show someone what we can do with a Lifelink, they want it. They want that functionality on their system. Some may take longer than others, and in some cases the process is quick and simple. But we take calls every single day about WSD. It's no longer a question of, "What is this and do I need it?" These calls are about, "how do I get it?"