home-automation

Filed under: kind of insane code, be careful about doing this at home. Recently we went electric, and got a Chevy Bolt to replace our 12 year old Toyota Prius (who has and continues to be a workhorse). I had a spot in…

When I first discovered the Open West conference, I was told it was the biggest US open source event that I'd never heard of, which is a pretty apt description. Open West brings together technologists interested in Open…

I'm thrilled to be talking about the Internet of Things and Home Assistant at the OpenWest conference next week. The talk for it has come together quite nicely, and I'll hopefully be giving it a few more places over the…

Nearly 7 years ago I started down a project to use existing oregon scientific weather sensors to collect temperature data throughout our house. The basic idea is that Oregon Scientific weather sensors all communicate…

A really interesting thing happens if you have a reasonably long standing, stable, and documented API in the wild for a while. Other people start building their own implementations to serve different needs. My current…

People often ask me about my vision for Home Assistant. Before I can describe where I want to go with Home Assistant, I should first talk about how home automation would look in my ideal world. This will be the aim of…

Gizmodo has a great piece on cheap home automation gone terribly mediocre . It's actually really interesting to realize how often we as humans need to relearn the idea of resiliency, durability, usability and in systems.…

I've been going on a tear this week and converting most of the lighting in our house to LED lighting (I am going to write this up in detail later). There are a lot of reasons to change out bulbs to LEDs, and I'm going to…

(Note, this old post is background on some of the things I was doing here before.) A few weeks ago I lost my rfxcom receiver during a lightning storm. Which meant my old weather station reporting on http://home.dague.net…

July is a tough meeting for MHVLUG, people are off on vacation, and our turnout over the last few years has been pretty low. It's one of the few times we drop below 20 people. As Ben was putting together the schedule…

Last night I managed to get some more time on the Arduino, getting a basic color rotate working. Youtube video below: I'm now trying to figure out a reasonable algorithm for generating colors that would simulate the…

The July MHVLUG meeting (aka Arduino-palooza ) is something I'm really looking forward to, if nothing other than it has finally added the extra excuse to kick me into gear to start doing something with the Arduino and…

I got my self some new temperature sensors for my hacked together home thermal monitor. The software that runs this is still aweful, that's on my project list. But at least now I'm able to figure out thermal variance…

The last thing you want to hear at midnight is "the icecream has turned to soup" when your wife wanders to the downstairs chest freezer to get some home made icecream out. Granted, because it was boozy…

One of the things that most excited me out the Google I/O event a couple weeks back was Google TV . It's a set top box that brings a lot of web content to the TV. But what really excites me about it is that it's an…

It's been 2 years since I got my Proliphix thermostat , and while I did some early hacking on it , largely the whole effort just sat around for the last 2 years. However, with the fun of connecting up my weather sensors…

I've finally got some very simple ruby code collecting my weather sensors to the round robin database . It took me some time this weekend to finally get my head around RRD, with having to predefine all the data you want…

A few years ago I bought an Oregon Scientific wireless weather station. It's a nice way to keep an eye on what's going on outside. The unit supports up to 3 of these remote sensors (shown here), and aggregates it at a…

Back in October I had a chance to talk with some Central Hudson (our local power company) reps at an IEEE conference. During that conversation I was disappointed to find out that there weren't any near term smart meters…

When not working on OpenSim , I've been doing a bunch of random side projects in Ruby. One of the more recent ones has been a more advanced control and monitoring tool for my thermostat . Along the way I created a module…

I definitely don't have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script: #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'thermostat' require…

John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set. Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune…

While our new woodstove insert is really great, and is definitely reducing our oil usage, it causes a bit of an issue when it comes to distributing the heat through the house. When running on wood heat we get warmth…

Rule #1 - don't do a wordpress upgrade when jet lagged after a 20 hr flight from India Having violated rule #1, I was very happy to remember that I'm doing nightly backups of that environment with backuppc . 60 seconds…

or sometime over the last 12 months, in no particular order I'm one of those folks that has lucid dreams while taking malaria meds . The dreams are cool, though I could leave behind all the waking up in the middle of the…

After reading cote's blog post on the chumby , I got intrigued. The chumby is a small linux device, specifically designed to run flash based widgets, served up from the chumby servers. It looks like and interesting…

About 6 months ago I bought an Olevia 542i 42" HDTV. It isn't the best 42" TV that you can get, but it is one of the best deals, and it is a very respectable set. Nice features of the set include a VGA input…

For the past six months, Verizon has been spending a lot of time in our neighborhood. I was as likely to spot little tented trucks with big spools of cable spilling out, as deer on my way to work. Every day this last…

Last night my MediaGate MG-35 arrived. This is a small front end device for playing back video, audio, or picture content off of a central server. I've got an xbox solution for this in the main living room, but with…

This weekend I finally built my new home file server (been meaning to do this for most of 2006). The impetus was that last weekend I noticed Seagate 320 GB SATA2 drives priced at $95 / per on NewEgg, and just couldn't…

It appears that there is an AMD price breaking coming . This is great news, as I had almost decided on getting another bare bones system over the weekend to use as a home media server, but now will hold off until after…

Over the weekend I finally got around to actually finishing the openwrt install on my Linksys wrt54gs that I first modified back in June. This means I finally have both 802.11g in the house, and I have traffic shaping on…