RWVHP - Home Automation

Serial is Dead, Long Live Serial

2008-02-25T08:31:00Z

While looking for the holy grail in home automation protocols, I made a little discovery, a bit of kit called a Connect ME made by Digi. What this bit of hardware does is give you an over-sized RJ45 plug (or wireless antenna) and built into it is an embedded OS with development kit, now your probably asking “And?”, well here’s the thing in home automation, most of it can be interfaced via serial/RS-232, which is one of the things the Connect ME has connectivity for (as well as GPOs), so that “Service Port” on the back of your TV/AV Amp may just have another use, X10 / DMX / 1-Wire are some of other protocols made accessible.

So what do you do once you’ve hacked up all of the hardware needed to control everything? Start writing the software to interface with it should be a good start, now you don’t really wanna mess this up as your going to be doing it for lots of different devices, but all with the same hardware constraints, so no nice flashy web interface for this little device, course there is, make the web front-end a back-end, make it a web service and provide an interface that uses it, across all of your home automation devices. Hook the devices up with Zeroconf and they can be auto-detected by your interface, plug and play automation, once you build it and code it.

Now I know you could setup something like this using SNMP but come on where’s the fun in that?

So I guess the title of this should have been “Serial has gone 2.0”?

Wall mounted my TV what a pain

2008-02-09T11:10:00Z

Last night a friend and I wall mounted my TV it was simple, put bracket onto wall, put other half of bracket onto TV, lift it up to the wall and put the two bits back together, oh and take the normal stand off… that was the pain right there, 4 screws, four evil little screws that wouldn’t budge even tho unscrewed, as if held in with magic, we tried magnetic screwdrivers and even turning the TV horizontal and shaking it, not an easy job with a TV that weighs more then a large dog and is over a meter wide.

Got there in the end tho (took about one and half hours).

I’m enjoying the NAS + XBOX360 with HD-DVD drive + TV setup, now if only the NAS + XBOX supported controllers then I could use my phone to change video.

Now what to do for the cables running down the wall.

Ordered more home automation stuff

2008-01-19T00:41:00Z

I like gadgets, probably too much, I also like integrating everything with everything else, so on rolls HA or Home Automation.

I’ve already had a X10 setup for a while that allows me to control lights, I’ve integrated this with Asterisk (with help from Adhearsion) which allows me to control lights from any phone, I also hooked Asterisk up with Amarok.

Well today I ordered some 1-Wire hardware to play with, I didn’t fancy running more cables for the 1-Wire setup and found HA7Net which is a Ethernet to 1-Wire gateway basically, the only problem with it seems to be you need to scrape the embedded web server as it doesn’t provide any kind of web service. I also ordered a 1-Wire temperature sensor to mess around with, and help me make a Ruby gem for the HA7Net.

I’ll try and get around to documenting what hardware I’ve got setup, as I can never remember what’s where and providing what (from VoIP phones, NAS, embedded machines, servers, consoles to a Nabaztag).