Bridging the Automation/IP Gap
Derek R. Flickinger
You know the old saying: “The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them.”
One of the barriers to the growth of home automation is that there are many competing standards and none seems to talk to the other. In addition, communicating and controlling these “standards-based” devices from a computer usually requires custom drivers for each protocol, and often each device.
In a perfect world, consumers should be able to buy products from a variety of vendors and have them “automagically” communicate together and dynamically show up in the computer.
What is needed is a common way to abstract the characteristics of each device in a “standardized” way so that one vendor’s device can be seen and controlled by another vendor’s automation software without having a custom-developed “translator” between them.
We are now one step closer to that dream, thanks to a new bridge from Archronix (ARCX) that links ZigBee with Web Services for Devices.
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