10 Hot Home Automation Trends
By Lisa Montgomery
The latest buzz when it comes to managing and controlling your home.

Home automation, or home control as it’s also called, is constantly changing. And like most technologies, it improves with age. It gets smarter, less expensive and easier to use each year. We’d be remiss not to mention some of the improvements and enhancements destined to hit the marketplace—and your home—in the very near future. From 1 to 10, in no particular order, here are the hot topics.

Snazzy Controls
Operating your home’s lights, thermostats and A/V gear from a touch-sensitive control panel can be fairly boring, unless your panel’s got some snazzy graphics to keep you engaged and entertained. Yes, programming your thermostats to setback automatically can actually be fun.



Home automation manufacturers are making it simpler for home systems installers to add fancy features to touchpanels by including multimedia platforms like Flash, Java and Guifx into their software. Often with a point and click, home systems installers can dress up the panels with animation, unique buttons and colorful backgrounds.

They can give the touchpanel the same look and feel of an iPhone, where gestures like finger swipes set an automation scene into motion or “pinching” the screen zooms in a surveillance camera. “This is the kind of stuff that gives automation a real wow factor,” says Jeff Singer, communications director for home automation manufacturer Crestron. “By in large, home systems installers aren’t graphic artists. Now they can be, by just downloading objects from Flash right into their touchpanel designs.”

Most manufacturers believe that the wow shouldn’t stop at the touchpanel. Within their programming software, they’ve given home systems installers the tools to easily import that same graphic layout into other interfaces. The interface resizes itself automatically to fit the screen, be it that of a TV, keypad, remote control or iPad.

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