I was travelling back from a meeting yesterday on the train and decided to grab the UK edition of Wired to read to pass the time.  In it there was a good, short and to the point article on home automation perfect for anyone looking to understand what to hook up and where.  In the main it uses the Domia kit which is internationally available and hooks very nicely into Media Center. 

It’s a great article, worth a look and available totally online here.

Ok, it is time to admit it.  All is not well in the geeky home.  There are little niggles, everythings working but it’s not slick and it’s not well integrated enough.  It’s time to start finding some solutions.  Here are the snags, if you know a way I can overcome any of them, then let me know in a comment on this post, email me, or twitter me.

• There’s an annoying .net framework error popping up on the Media Center every so often.
• My Harmony remote isn’t quite set up well enough.  It doesn’t work well when the Media Center is already on.  The problem is that I’ve installed a standby saving power bar, which I want to keep, but it doesn’t play nice with the remote.
• I need to find a way to ARM the Y-CAM when we leave the house and disarm it when we return.  Or I need to move it to an area with slightly less traffic, i.e. where we don’t walk all the time so that my mailbox doesn’t fillup!
• I need to be able to view the Y-CAM stream on my Windows Mobile device, or at least be able to see the latest image.  That might mean configuring FTP, which means finding a secure FTP server on the net.
• I want to workout the overall power consumption of the kit in the house.  I might be scared.
• The TV Arial just doesn’t seem to be quite right, it’s a few degrees off!  Time for cable?
• My Windows Home Server is using a bit too much power, 40kwh in standby – that needs to come down.

Technorati Tags: y-cam,media center

For a while now I’ve been looking at some home monitoring systems and how I can best integrate them into my digital experience.  Previously I’ve used Yawcam with some pretty great results but currently I’m trying to reduce my carbon foot print and I want to make everything that has to run as low power consumption a possible.  For that reason I really wanted an IP Webcam that didn’t need a PC powered on all the time.

Having done loads of looking about the only really good thing I could find was from Y-CAM.  It’s now been delivered and it’s installed.  I picked the Y-CAM Black and bought from ebuyer, since it was about £30 cheaper than everywhere else.

Having installed it, at first it really wasn’t a great experience, it didn’t like my router and it brought down the whole network…I’ve done a firmware update now and all seems to work well.  Very well.

This camera sees really well in the dark with its knight vision, and the management software is pretty good.  Actually it’s a breeze to setup.  It can do motion alerts to email, which again was simple to setup and allows me to select 4 regions of the picture to watch for motion.

Two I need to work through at the moment:

• I need to setup FTP publishing to somewhere so that I can view the camera at work since I can’t see the active X control
• I need to get an app for my WinMo phone that allows me to view mp4 encoded RTSP…unfortunately HTC Streaming media won’t cut it.

Finally I’ve also emailed the manufacturer to find out if they have an API, so that I can develop something to easily arm the motion detection.

Gotta say I’m really loving the experience of Home Server.  It’s got to be one one the best products MS have put out in years!  It’s so simple, so well thought out.  I’ve got the client “Connector” software installed on both my laptop and Media Center and both have started to do backups.  And that client tells me what’s going on with a little pop up bubble.

I’m currently trying to do a MASSIVE backup over WiFi (802.11g) but it’s seriously slow, and it keeps failing.  That’s my WiFi network card though I’m sure that keeps vanishing.  Trouble is I don’t have a CAT5 Patch cable to speed things up!!

I’ve piled on two add-ins so far.  Both from We Got Served (Fantastic resource).  The first is Event Viewer – simple and useful.  The second is Whiist, which lets you add web sites and customise the basic home server web site that you see when you connect remotely.

Here is said server, it’s my old Media Center, an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 1.25gb RAM, two disks one 160gb and one 300gb.

It’s fair to say there are a number of projects I want to do ggua year and I intend to post about each of them as I do them.

cctv: I want to be able to remotely monitor the house while we are away from home. By that I mean being able to monitor the front door and have it capture the face of all visitors. I also want it to alert on approach to the house.

Media Center setup: I want to change the setup so that the current MC box becommes a WHS box. We’ll buy a new PC which will becomme the media center. In the master bedroom I want to have a v2 extender, or possibly an X360. In the kitchen I want a squeezebox to pull music down from the WHS.

The Phone: I’m currently thinking about upgrading to the Touch Plus on T-mobile, unless Orange an beat the deal! I’ll be moving to a normal data package, so I’ll be able to use it to blog during the day, to check the home cctv and setup and anything else good.

Home automation: I want the lounge to be on IR remote control from the Harmony remote. I want the rest of the house to be on HomeEasy and for all that gear to be controlled by the Media Center! Need to work out a way to control the loung on that…perhaps I should re think the IR control in the lounge?

Security: I want an alarm for the house that notifies us about all sorts of household alerts, doors / windows left open, smoke, motion etc. I also want some of the house lights to turn on on approach to the house.

I think thats all the tech projects covered…they may be changed a little with our trip to Seattle in May.

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I wanted some form of monitoring from the home setup of something. Not really sure why but I sometimes get a bit worried when we are away from home.

So I picked up a Tesco Value Webcam and found the rather good Yawcam software after lots of searching. Good webcam software is hard to find. I now have, for less than £6, a motion sensitive security camera. It works too, bit needs some tweaking to get it right, I had 40 emails from it today. Oh yeah, that’s what it does, emails me when it detects motion and runs a web server that I can connect to to check in on it any time.

Todo: make it run through IIS, make it less sensitive, work out a way to activate it when we leave the house.

This looks like a really interesting new system that I’d really love to get into.

The Greener Grass: Concept – Current State

This is an automation system that does remote control of sockets, but the killer feature is that it also monitors and reports the power consumption of those units! I’d love to be able to do that, it’s one of those things I’m starting to get interested in, how to make my tech more green.

For me making changes means understanding the current situation, to do that I’d need to measure my power output.

Also today I watched this video from MS Technet Edge about working out how much power your kit uses. They use a great little bit of tech to do their monitoring…I wonder how much I could get my consumption down to?….I wonder what my consumption is?