I have had a “smart” home for probably over thirty years. So I get amused by the “new” trends in home automation such as Philips Hue, and Wink, etc. The new technology is great, definitely better than what I have been using, but when I look at replacing what I have I find the costs to be prohibitive. Re-doing my house would cost about $1000 and in some ways not be as good as what I currently have.
So what do I currently have? Well I have been using a system known as X10. It works by sending signals over the existing house wiring. The biggest issue with it is that house wiring is bad for sending signals, too much interference and noise. But in my case, it works pretty well.
I recently got a free smart home consultation from Amazon. I was pleasantly surprised that it was not a hard sell, but instead was a true consultation with an Amazon employee who was pretty knowledgeable about the current technologies (but not about X10). I described the system I had and we tried to duplicate the X10 functionality with newer technology. Unfortunately it became obvious that the only things the new technology beat the X10 system in was in voice control with Amazon Alexa and being able to use LED bulbs. X10 doesn’t work well with LED bulbs.
The wall switches were three times more expensive, the motion detectors were also more expensive and bulky. So I decided that I would try to stay with my X10 system for awhile and see if there was a way to integrate it with Amazon Alexa and then slowly migrate to a newer technology.
So off to the Internet to see what could be done and I found a workable solution (although a bit of a hack) for adding Alexa voice control to the X10. While I won’t go into detail here you can read about it at How to Control X10 Devices With Amazon Echo or Google Home.
The biggest issue I had was all of the articles I read described doing it on Linux, not on Windows. But I found another site that had everything I needed to do it in Windows: tuicemen.com/alex10/
In summary,
I had to buy a USB X10 PC Transceiver which sends RF signals to my existing X10 wireless receivers. That was about $20.
Downloaded the software for Alex10, which included a Philips Hue emulator – HA-bridge.
HA bridge is complicated, but the Alex10 software provides an easy way to define your X10 lights and macros to HA bridge. Also HA bridge is a Java program with a web interface so getting everything to play together was tricky. Alex10 kept showing errors when trying to start HA bridge, and there was a port conflict on port 80. But, as I said it was a bit of a hack, with trial and error I got everything working. Actually, the biggest issue I had was that I misunderstood what I needed to get Alexa to scan for the x10 modules. I thought I needed to install the Philips Hue skill, which kept asking me to press the “big” button on the Hue bridge. Since I didn’t have an actual Hue bridge there was no button. I finally found that using the “add a device” link in the Alexa app causes Alexa to scan the network for devices, and that the HA bridge software shows the X10 devices as Hue devices to Alexa. Voilà, I could use Alexa voice control with my X10 devices.
So now that I have voice control I will start looking at slowing migrating to a new system. I will probably purchase a wink hub ($100) and some lights (about $10 or $15 apiece), and maybe some wall switches ($30 to $60 per switch)