Automated homes do things for you, they react to you and your actions using sensors to detect what you’re doing then turn on the lights, work the blinds, or change the temperature accordingly. In my house, my lights are motion detecting in some areas which makes them use far less power as I can’t leave them on.
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.
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?