Week (2 hours)

 

Texts: “Overview and benefits”

Grammar: The Gerund

Communicative practice: “Eating out”

 

Text: “Overview and benefits”

 

The use of gaseous or liquid fuels, and later the use of electricity enabled increased automation in heating, reducing the labor necessary to fuel heaters and stoves. Development of thermostats allowed more automated control of heating, and later cooling.

A remote control for moving vessels and vehicles was first patented by Nikola Tesla in 1898.

World's Fairs in Chicago, New York (1939) and depicted electrified and automated homes. In 1966 Jim Sutherland, an engineer working for Westinghouse Electric, developed a home automation system called "ECHO IV"; this was a private project and never commercialized.

With the invention of the microcontroller, the cost of electronic control fell rapidly. Remote and intelligent control technologies were adopted by the building services industry and appliance manufacturers worldwide, as they offer the end user easily accessible and/or greater control of their products.

As the number of controllable appliances in the home rises, the ability of these devices to interconnect and communicate with each other digitally becomes a useful and desirable feature. The consolidation of control or monitoring signals from appliances, fittings or basic services is an aim of home automation.

In simple installations this may be as straightforward as turning on the lights when a person enters the room. In advanced installations, rooms can sense not only the presence of a person inside but know who that person is and perhaps set appropriate lighting, temperature, music levels or television channels, taking into account the day of the week, the time of day, and other factors.

Other automated tasks may include setting the air conditioning to an energy saving setting when the house is unoccupied, and restoring the normal setting when an occupant is about to return. More sophisticated systems can maintain an inventory of products, recording their usage through bar codes, or an RFID tag, and prepare a shopping list or even automatically order replacements.

Home automation can also provide a remote interface to home appliances or the automation system itself, via telephone line, wireless transmission or the internet, to provide control and monitoring via a smart phone or web browser.

An example of a remote monitoring in home automation could be when a smoke detector detects a fire or smoke condition, and then all lights in the house will blink to alert any occupants of the house to the possible fire. If the house is equipped with a home theatre, a home automation system can shut down all audio and video components to avoid distractions, or make an audible announcement. The system could also call the home owner on their mobile phone to alert them, or call the fire department or alarm monitoring company.

 

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