home :: ha
My motivation for automating my house came from watching the BBC
program "Tommorrows World" on TV in the late 1970's through 1980's and
being in awe of the amazing futuristic houses and gadgets. When I
moved to a new house at the end of 2001 I was determined to see what
home gadgets would actually be useful and make a difference. Many of
the existing home automation systems you can buy off the shelf or have
installed are proprietary, most only work on Windows. So I decided to
make it a spare-time hobby to automate my house in a useful way, on a
small budget, and to make it fun to do so. An essential requirement
was to have it all run on open source technologies. I wouldn't risk my
house on an instable, expensive OS that I have no control over.
Design overhaul (26 Apr 2006)
The biggest problem with my home grown Home Automation system is that
I'm not a graphic designer, so my displays all looked clunky and like
they've come out of the 1980's...
1-wire Hardware (02 Apr 2006)
I use a Dallas 1-wire
network for temperature sensing and control around the house...
Displaying a moving image with Perl/Tk (12 Mar 2006)
My home automation tablets use Perl/Tk as their user interface which
makes coding and prototyping really quick and easy and works on both
Linux and Windows platforms...
Controlling a Plasma Screen via the Internet (20 Nov 2005)
Earlier this year I finally got around to buying a replacement TV, and
settled on a Hitachi PD7200 plasma...
Live status (updated every few minutes, hit reload) (17 Jun 2005)
Intelliswitch Wall Dimmers (08 Oct 2004)
We didn't think much about lighting when our house was being built, so
it ended up being fitted out by the builder just like every other new
home with standard white plate light switches...
Custom software using Jabber/XMPP (11 Sep 2003)
Protocol: Jabber
I toyed with several ways of dealing with the home automation system...
Mounting a Fujisu Point tablet on the wall (23 Jul 2003)
I wanted to be able to mount the Fujitsu Point 510 on the wall...
Brief Overview (13 Jul 2003)
Infrastructure
3 CAT5 cables to most rooms in the house...
My HA-related weblog articles
see all at flickr.com
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