This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.