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Home Automation, 1990s Style
It is a truism that the cobbler’s children have no shoes, the carpenter’s house has a leaky roof, and none of the plumber’s own toilets flush properly. I would add to that: An electrical engineer’s home wiring is a mysterious network none other should touch. My best friend is an engineer (mechanical, so his cars are always in need of repair), and has described all engineers as inherently lazy and misdirected. “You see” he likes to start, “Engineers hate doing any work, even simple work, and so they spend their life’s energies devoted to finding ways to avoid it, even if the quest for said ways takes far longer, and requires more blood, sweat, and tears than just doing the job in the first place.” When you turn loose such an engineer on a house and its wiring, you begin an adventure in electrical mystery, complete with enough random strobing lights, and lights that mysteriously turn on or off, to put the Winchester Mansion to shame. Electrical engineers can do far more than any mere eldritch forces.
Enter my father. Long before the current home automation push, with Nest Thermostats and WiFi lightbulbs and every tech company having a mic in every room to spy on you, and a speaker to flatter you about said spying, my father had the notion that a computer controlled and networked house was a sure-fire winner, and to demonstrate this he decided that our house would be the guinea pig. And why not? It was getting remodeled and expanded, and that made for the perfect opportunity to put in the network wire and junction boxes all over. It sounded good in theory, and moreover he already had the experience in creating the first smart and computerized electrical systems in vocational trucks (the term you hear today is “Multiplexed”), reducing the miles and miles of point-to-point wiring, mechanical switching, relay banks, stacks of relay logic, and all the days of labor associated with wiring up a truck. All of that was reduced to a single smart panel, entirely solid state, and that was in the late 1980s. By the early 90s, he was ready to apply those concepts to a house.
The system was, for its time, rather clever. Around the house, hidden behind cover plates in the walls, were distribution panels that could handle up to 4 120v circuits. They were each given an address, and then networked together over Cat3 (decent Wifi being then a good 10 years off). Then there were the display panels around the house. They had 2 alpha-numeric character VFDs (Vacuum Fluorescent Displays) of 8 characters, allowing a string of 16 at a time to display, or more if you scrolled. They had six programmable buttons for operating the loads, and a mode switch for accessing other routines. In theory, you could use a panel in the kitchen, by toggling the mode switch, to turn lights on or off in the great-room. My father even had begun work on some basic voice command modules, an alarm system / phone system integration, and a wireless remote. So much for theory.
The system never had a chance. For one thing, I had to help build it, and I was personally responsible for a greatly narrowed implementation scope. Put simply, I killed several of the power boards during assembly. Everything had to be hand soldered. Each board, power and interface, had a Motorolla CPU on it (HC08 series for those keeping score), but they had to go in sockets, and sockets then were not keyed. You could put them in with the wrong rotation, or even on the wrong side of the board. I put them on the wrong side of the board (in fairness, my instructions were verbal, and had to be modulated to the right level of volume and anger to penetrate a lazy 17 year old skull, which tended to overwhelm details of things like orientation or polarity). The sockets had 60 pins – in theory one can rework such boards without frying traces, but we’re well out of the bounds of theory here. Half the boards were ruined right out of the gate, and he hadn’t ordered many spares.
Just as well, I suppose. He never finished the master control panel, which would have powered the logic part of all these boards, and that meant that when he installed what could be made to work, he had the data lines of the back end running on a spare computer (an early 90s laptop) by way of a severed and spliced serial cable, and the 5v system power running off a patched-up up lab power supply, connected by wire nuts and prayers. He only had enough modules for the kitchen and the foyer by the front door, though it should be noted that their kitchen was huge and had at least 6 different light circuits. Until he could get more power modules, the hallways and the upstairs (including the master bedroom) was dark.
What did work, though, worked well and as promised. Tap on a switch and a light came one. Tap it again, and off it went. Hold on the switch and the light would come on then gradually dim down to a minimum, and if you held it long enough it would brighten back up again. Tap the mode switch and you had control over other circuits (if permitted for that panel and location). He was very proud, and when we had a big party there some months later, he was showing it off to guests, and boasting of the coming voice control. “…And I’ll be able to say my name, then command the door open!” One of the guests asked if it was working yet. “Oh, of course. I say ‘Door, Open!’, then get out my key and open it!” That got a lot of laughs.
Then we had our first big summer thunderstorm, and thus began a 10 year war of attrition. The system never advanced beyond its debut at that party as all my father’s spare time (which wasn’t much) went to keeping it from failing altogether. A lightning strike near the house (we lived in the country, with the house in the middle of a field) fried a regulator on the board that controlled the lighting over the kitchen table, and everything wired to that board would flicker randomly when on. He tried to repair it, but this only bought it time. It was a very stormy summer, and one by one the other panels suffered damage, as did the laptop running the code. By the end of the summer the light over the table would regularly flicker, and the light over the island would come on of its own accord, which was creepy as heck when you were trying to grab a midnight snack. You’d open the fridge, knowing you were alone in the kitchen, and *blip* it would come on, just like Mom catching you in the act. Worse yet, it would then snap back off after scaring you so badly you dropped the mayo jar onto your foot.
I was off to college then, but my sister and mother reported to me that it was getting worse. Eventually my father had to break down and replace a couple of panels by trying to resurrect the ones I had ruined. He also made a number of timing adjustments in the code on the laptop, to account for the sluggishness in the RS232 signals he was using to run the show. When I got home at the end of the school year, it was almost back to where it had been when new. Except for the flickering over the kitchen table – that never ceased. Over the course of that summer it got even worse. There were now frequent power outages as the once bucolic surroundings were getting plowed under, and construction crews kept severing the lines everywhere. These new houses and businesses creeping in also overloaded the system – my father scoped the power at the meter, and instead of the nice sine wave you’d expect we were getting almost a chopped square wave with some funky peaks.
The irregular, and now quite dirty power was beyond the system’s filtering. Worse yet, some of the circuits now strobed. It was like a 9th grade dance party, but without the music. Some days it was fine, others it was atrocious, you just could not predict it. Each summer I came home to just a bit less functionality in the system, and even more lighting gremlins. One time the system stuck on, with every light on (and some strobing, of course), other times I’d have to go and reboot the laptop, then yank the power feed, then reboot the laptop again and reconnect it all. When I brought my future wife home for the first time I had to explain “Just use these buttons here, don’t touch those – the lights for those will come on and not go off, or strobe badly enough to cause migraines.” My father had by this time become too busy with work to have the time to do anything more than just keep it going, promising to fix and finish it when he finally had the time.
By 2001 my mother was done. She laid down the law and demanded that he either finish it or replace it. He was sick of it too, and so out it all came, with standard switches going in. He still has the old modules squirreled away in a bin somewhere, a memento of a dream he nearly fulfilled, but marital bliss took precedence over the system. It was a great concept, but ahead of the available technology (though I’d bet he could have gotten it sorted if his other business hadn’t claimed so much time). And it ran on a great deal less computing overhead than today’s systems do – a bunch of 8-bit micros with just a few k of memory. What is done today is done with off-the-shelf modules that each have more computing power than his entire system, and they’re all networked and thus hackable to the world over. All to just dim some lights and twiddle the thermostat. But that’s the way of tech – lots of tinkering and lost opportunities until the world finally settles on a standard – which it will then quickly abandon right after your warranty expires.
Like my friend says, engineers will work like mad to solve even simple problems, in this case the problem of a mechanical switch. It was a problem that needed solving on vehicles (and indeed still does – you’d be amazed how many truck still use 1950s wiring techniques, which do not mesh well with the rest of the vehicle – computerized right from the OEM), but it was not then (and I’d argue still is not now) a problem that really needs solved for houses. It was a fun dream for those few years, but I don’t miss the strobing.
Published in Technology
Yeah, I bet that was fun for somebody who gets migraines. Surprised you came home at all.
There’s a whole genre of Forties cartoons about automated homes. Here’s MGM’s:
https://vimeo.com/32889552
Your home system sounds a little like electronic fuel injection for 1958 cars, supersonic airliners in the 1960s, or the 1972 design approved for the Space Shuttle: the right idea but premature, not robust enough yet to be reliable.
And this is why I spent $400 buying echobees to replace my ghetto Nest thermostat.
Unless I misunderstand the story, Mr. Skipsul Sr. could have simply gone with something like the common, but limited X10 standard for home electrical control, but chose to home brew something more advanced. I can only applaud that.
I’m not sure x10 was a standard when he started…
It was. Part of why I know that is based on the high crime rates of the Seventies, the original reason to come up with a power line current household network that (when outfitted with sensors) could protect a family. As times relaxed (relatively, anyway), the X10 marketing was moved over to convenience.
I guess reading the Wiki page I can’t refute that. But I’m skeptical that Mr Skipsul would have been aware of it and seen it as a financially viable alternative.
My take-away still stands: it’s fun playing on the edge of technology. Until you need it, then it’s not, because whatever you built ain’t up to it.
We had an X10 home in the late 70s and early 80s. I’m not sure why Mr. She (a gadgeteer with a couple years of engineering school under his belt before he went in another direction) didn’t take the same route as Dad Skipsul, but in retrospect, and although I have fewer stories to recount of things going haywire, I’m grateful.
I do have a closet full of useless gear though, left over from that and numerous other projects . . .
Witchcraft. All of it.
Hey now… that’s just mean.
After 40 years of programming for a living, I have approximately zero interest in doing it as a hobby. (Actually, that became true the day I started writing software for money.) I also lack the optimization gene: I’m quite happy to follow a well-established but inefficient process for the rest of my life, rather than learning a new, better way.
This idiosyncratic defect is often pointed out to me by my children and others.
The house I own today was built in 1962. The fellow who built it was, for many years, the shop teacher at a local high school, and an irrepressible tinkerer: my basement ceiling is a maze of coax, twisted pair, and discrete wiring of many generations; there are smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, motion detectors, and unidentifiable solid-state gadgets all over the place.
One thing he didn’t do, unlike your father, was design his own electrical system. His real gift was woodworking, not electronics. So he did the electrical system off-the-shelf, using some stuff that was apparently pretty popular in the early 1960s: low-voltage switch wiring leading to relay panels hidden in the closets. It’s conceptually simple, and it lets you do some things that are hard to do with conventional wiring, such as wiring three switches to each control a single light.
But it means that I’m dependent on relays, transformers, and switches that are about as old as I am. After seven years in this home I’ve had one relay failure, and was able to re-purpose a relay used in a circuit that had never been completed. I know I can find the parts on eBay, and I’ll eventually resort to that. The problem with low-voltage switches is that only low-voltage wiring runs through the walls, and so there is no easy conversion; simply replacing the switches with conventional light switches isn’t an option.
On the other hand, having all of my lighting and switchable outlets controlled by three relay panels would make wireless automation of my home relatively easy, were I the tinkering kind. Which I am not.
And yet you’ve not denied it.
There are a lot of good solid-state alternatives to all that today.
This is a great post. Thanks!
A while back I managed a production line. We had a few “engineer-types” in leadership who were very interested in very complex technological solutions to problems that we not actually problems (like your father’s mechanical light switches). Most of their interest was built out of a fascination in technology and the boundless potential at their fingertips. Being myself little more than a gorilla with 23 oz hammer, I found my job was often just to be the resident luddite and extoll the virtues of the established, known path; regardless of how boring and (mildly) laborious it might be. Every now and then these guys would get out of their cage and do something momentarily amazing. Then it would inevitably decay (usually quickly) to an unmanageable mess of wires that I would have to clean up. I would usually give them a few months to try repairs and re-fits, but once they had given up on their project for a month straight, I would clear out the science project and bring us back to the tried and true – usually to heavy protestations and some mild anger and abuse. It was an obnoxious cycle, but every once in a blue moon, they got one right and it was pretty epic.
If your friend has a goiter, how do you go about telling them they’ve got a goiter? Of all the people in the world who know about the goiter, it’s most likely to be… them.
Also: Guilty as charged.
He was probably aware of X10, but his interest was not just in automating the home, but in making a business of it with his own products and his own communications protocols. X10 devices use the power lines as data stream carriers – all well and good, but X10 products are limited. What my father envisioned was a lot like what he used to revolutionize vehicle wiring (within a few years of his rolling that system out, it was dominant in its markets), where people could do with their homes what the various smart gadgets are doing today. He foresaw that homes would soon be ethernet wired during construction (as mine was in 2003), which meant that X10 protocols would be unnecessary, and PCs could add sophistication and control not otherwise possible.
I know. And the day will undoubtedly come when I overcome my lethargy/Luddite tendencies and replace the 3×3′ plywood relay boards with little panels of thyristors (or whatever it is you electronic people use). Then I won’t hear the little click in the closet every time I turn a light on or off, but I’ll get used to that.
I use to have that boundless energy to try my hand at the bleeding edge of what technology we could do…. rather than what is the minimum I can get away with design wise. After all of the tribulations of following that lark, and some near misses in the failure department, I have evolved to the KISS principle.
I now only pull out the esoteric design stuff when the requirements leave me no choice, (and I have been know to push on those requirement to make sure I don’t have to do any rabbit/hat pulling designs) and then sweat the verification process six ways from Sunday to make sure nothing bites us in orbit.
Experience, it’s a bitch.
Sounds like your father might need this T-shirt:
Great story and calls to mind a few automation attempts of my own that are best forgotten . . .
“Hello, my name is Phil, and I am an electrical engineer.”
There are scattered “Hi Phil”s from the crowd of men with pocket protectors. (Women EEs seem to avoid this affliction.)
“I’ve been clean for thirty years, now. My home remains un-automated. My marriage is intact.”
Weak applause follows, mixed with a few whispers of disbelief…
“But I need your help: I keep visiting Arduino project pages and ogling the glittery shields. My will to resist is fading…”
This is why Skip’s employees are so surprised that when something like this happens at work, Skip just looks up momentarily and shrugs *Hmmm…*
In the late Fifties, full sized Fords had two types of convertibles, one of them the usual cloth top, the other with a complete metal hardtop that disappeared into the “trunk”. There are a couple of more modern cars that revived the style. At the time, Ford’s publicity department claimed the wiring needed to bring off this little miracle was something like a quarter-mile’s worth: 1,320 feet. I knew, even as a kid, that was exaggerated. Recently I found out that the correct number was actually “only” 400-plus feet of point to point wiring (going back and forth along a 17 foot long car will do that).
That’s what Skip’s multiplexing eliminated. Like a token ring setup, or an ethernet loop, everything plugs into one set of wires.
I can’t help thinking about The Party.
440 ft. of conductor; 440 ft. of insulation; 440 ft. of abrasion sheath. Ta-Da! A quarter-mile of “wiring.”
Don’t forget the grounding requirements. Easier in the 50’s of course, but still critical.
So, if it were chassis grounded, they could add the distance from the grounding mounts to the battery in the “wiring” length”?
As the patent lawyer, I have to say, “But this is a key path to inventions.” Many of the best inventions I have seen in my career have been by people who have spent enormous amounts of time trying to answer “there must be an easier way to do this task.”
Thousands of people like your father enabled various technologies that we use routinely today (not necessarily in home automation).
The early developers of automobiles would have covered a lot more physical ground if instead of tinkering with their internal combustion engines they had simply saddled up their horses (or hitched their wagons to the horse).
The founder of my former employer (Xerox Corp.) spent years developing the process of xerographic photocopying because he tired of hand-copying documents for his boss (a lawyer), and he thought the liquid photocopying processes then available messy and cumbersome.
College students spent hours and hours developing self-guiding robots because they were too lazy to pause their videogames and walk down the dorm hallway to the soda vending machine.
Not quite comparable (because there are religious rules involved), but Jews invented the motion sensing light switches to avoid the “work” of switching a light switch on the Sabbath.
Such engineers (and similarly “lazy” people) give us wonderful (and some not-so-wonderful) inventions.
And my brand new house is almost totally not automated (except for the programmable but not internet enabled thermostat).
Indeed. I think my father now has 18 patents to his name, some for some pretty revolutionary things in the vehicle industry.
Exactly! If a store has any blinking lights, I have to leave.