Home automation is a combination of electronic devices, networks and software that take menial tasks such as locking the door to your home or turning off the lights, and does them automatically or allows the user to do them from a remote location via smart phone, tablet, computer, etc. The concept of home automation is not a new idea. The first company to develop home automation technology was X10 in 1975. X10 developed technology that used the existing wiring in a house to control appliances and devices. Although they had limited success, the technology had its flaws. The problem was that electrical lines weren’t reliable, the electrical lines would “hear noise” by powering other devices in the home and the signal to the target device would get lost in the noise. Since then companies have improved this technology and combined it with other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cell phone signals, creating what is known as a “mesh network”. With the communication technologies always advancing and the price and size of electronic components continuing to shrink, home automation is well on its way to be incorporated in many if not all of today’s modern homes.
There are many competing technologies in the home automation market but three stand out more than the rest, Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Insteon. Z-Wave was developed by a company called Zen-Sys that was purchased in 2008 by Sigma Designs .Z-Wave uses a proprietary communication protocol designed for automation of home and small commercial buildings. This protocol uses low-power wireless technology designed for remote control applications. Z-Waves wireless protocol was designed for reliability. The protocol uses low-latency communication of small data packets being sent over the 900MHz frequency to avoid interference with WI-FI and Bluetooth signals at the 2.4 GHz frequency, but there is still a small