• 3 CAT5 cables to most rooms in the house. Fortunately the builder ran some extra cables through the house for me before it was too late and the final fix happened. I found some cunning 3-outlet sockets from BKA which look good and blend into a domestic environment.

• Wireless network (802.11g) that reaches through most of the house, but on an untrusted part of the internal network. This generally gets used by web tablets as the coverage isn't great.

• Satellite-grade coax to most rooms. This allows the cable modem and cable tv box to all be in separate rooms and away from their entry point. Some of the internal cameras use these connections.

• UPS for all the important bits, highly necessary since the house voltage is regularly over 250 volts and a little tempremental sometimes.

• Various networking stuff: transparent firewall, second firewall+NAT, one of those D-Link multi-protocol print servers serving a laser and inkjet

• Home automation server. In early 2005 my old 400MHz PC finally gave up. It was running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (it was running Red Hat Linux even before I started working for Red Hat). Machine was replaced with a dual-AMD machine. This machine runs the Jabber server and the various HA bots.

• A central 19" patch panel for the CAT5, coax, and 10/100 16 port switch (bought from ebay). See photo (Mar 2002). 19" Wall bracket from Minitran

• Cable internet and TV from Telewest. The Telewest termination point is in the garage, see photo (Feb 2002). The cable goes to the central patch panel where it's split to the cable modem and runs back to the living room where the decoder lives at the moment.

• How we chose our lighting switches and settled on the Intelliswitch.

• A german LW11G X10 dimmer switch controlling 10 25W recessed lights in the main room, the switch *just* fits in the drywall backbox. I spent many hours working out where to put the computer control unit, a CM12U, so that it managed to send signals to reach all the rooms in the house - nearly everywhere I put it there was a blackspot where things wouldn't work. Anyway having the CAT5 meant it doesn't matter where the CM12U is as the CAT5 provides a serial link back to node0. An AD10 and LW10 finish off the X10 stuff, controlling two sets of Christmas lights right now. X10 stuff from Laser

• Control of the central heating system (it had a 240v switched input which we control with a relay from a 1-wire switch.

• A set of one-wire temperature sensors from Maxim together with a 1-wire usb interface to allow logging of temperature from around the house. We recently added a 1-wire hub so we could use a star network of more than a couple of sensors. Anyway the raw data goes into rrdtool and the output graphs get uploaded via DAV here.

• TiVo with a Turbonet ethernet board from 9th Tee - allowing remote control from any machine in the house

• Control of a plasma screen

• Five Fujitsu Point 1600 webpads mounted on the wall to control everything.

• Meteor Caller ID unit that logs incoming and outgoing calls. This is hooked to a Linux box with a bit of C software to decode the strange format

• Caller ID displayed on the TiVo by using the jabber system

• Alarm system. The communicator outputs are also wired to a Linux box which triggers various events based on the state of the alarm

• SMS alerts. The main linux box is hooked to a dedicated mobile phone used to send alerts from the UPS, alarm etc. (and allow remote control of various things). Since phone cables here are above ground they're too easy to cut!

Plans (as time and money permits)

• Control the external lighting and curtains (I installed pull-cord curtains already to make this easier)

• Work out a system for distributed TV. At the moment the TiVo's RF output feeds up to a distribution amplified in the loft, need to work out how to watch DVD's (RGB out only) and work on an IR distribution system (currently a single 'One For All' remote extender)

• Maybe move the TiVo and cable box to the node0 and send the signal up to the lounge over CAT5

Created: 13 Jul 2003