home automation

I say get used to the morgue-like cold now. Why wait for the inevitable?

My house is Z-Waved. It works very well, but I only have a simple standalone controller. No remote control, yet.

Bob

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Whatever you do, forget X-10. We have it and it's IMHO unreliable. We only use it for convenience stuff but I regret that I ever put it in because now I get to fix stuff that the designers screwed up, and I really don't want to.

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Regards, Joerg

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OK, no X10. Actually, the state of home automations is still fairly primitive. Some interesting products seem to be flakey or unavailable. Lots of the business models include hitting users for a monthly fee just to web enable the control boxes.

I may have to do it myself after all.

John

Is your house wired for ethernet? When I win the lottery, I plan to buy a house with an RJ-45 in every room ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Here's a forum I used while putting together a temperature monitoring system.

about 10 catagories of forums here, pick your topic(s)

As it says, the portal. Mike

I was able to "tame" my simple X-10 system, but your comment is valid and I've heard it from others. What I did was build filters to attenuate the noise created by various appliances. In my case, that works, but the trouble is that every time you add a new appliance or replace one, you may get a new noise source. Who'da thunk that replacing the old electric toothbrush with a new one would screw up the X-10? :-(

Ed

It might be easier to buy something like this

and hook it to an always-on computer and do my own software. That's sort of amazing, when you think about it.

John

I have Cat-5 to every room from a central box in the hall closet. I don't use any of them. The one I needed doesn't work so forgot the whole thing.

X10 has always worked for me, when I've wanted it[*]. I have a bunch of switches and crap I no longer use, though. The stuff looks like crap.

[*] I just turned off my outdoor Christmas lights. ;-) I don't use it the rest of the year so the appliance modules get packed with the lights and tree.

This was a topic on Leo Laporte's geek radio show. He suggested UPB

I have zero first hand knowledge of UPB, so take it for what's it worth.

The British firm at

does everything that you desire.

Get a power switch with a web server onboard and boot up from there

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

Sometimes I really question the competence of the engineers designing those modules. The AM on-off style protocol looks a bit daft as well. That's the last thing that would come to my mind in a noisy environment. It just does not make sense.

Those business models are a recipe for accelerated bankruptcy ;-)

Then it'd work. If it's just the heater why not use an old semi-retired laptop that still has a modem, connect it to the phone line and keep it in listen-only mode so it won't cut off the answering machine. The send a certain code number for "on" and another for "off".

Another slick method is a LabJack. Ok, costs $108 but comes with software that (AFAIK) can communicate via email. Check that that out before you buy one, I don't know how restricted the free SCADA SW is that comes with it. I have it, but never used the web comm stuff in it (can take a look if you want to). Then you could also have it report temps and such back to you.

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Less Dollars, works, have installed lots of these at clients:

Nice thing besides the accompanying SW is that you can get it into SPI mode and hang all sorts of chip onto it. In fact we use most of the client LabJacks in SPI mode.

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That sounds nice. I just ran a 48 foot Cat5 cable under a carpet, under a railing, across a stairway, snaked through a twisty-turney cutout into a closet, down a floor inside a return-air duct, out into the furnace room, through a wall to the closet where the DSL modem lives.

If I ever build anything it's going to have BIG wire ducts inside all the walls.

John

No pricing. I don't know about UPB either but with other technologies that usually means one of two things, or both: Over-priced or vaporware. Fact is, if you can't get it at HD, Lowes or at least RadioShack then it doesn't really exist.

There is lots of talk in this area and little action. Until a decent powerline comms system is in place I do not believe all this smart grid talk is worth much. In fact I no longer participate in any sessions because the bigshots in that domain keep brushing this issue aside. Hopefully smart grid isn't going to become another sinkhole for tax Dollars ...

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Doesn't even have to be that complicated...

In Eudora (for those of you not hampered by one-program-does-all ;-), you can set a filter to run an executable.

That's how I used to get E-mail processed and forwarded to my pager, such that replies went back thru my PC E-mail showing the correct reply address. (Executable courtesy of son, Aaron :-)

End recipient had no clue that I was replying via my pager. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
                     In wine there is wisdom,
                    In beer there is freedom,
                   In water there is bacteria
                                               - Benjamin Franklin

My web host company lets me do that sans programming effort. When on the road I have mail stored on their server, retrievable whenever I am at a hotel or an airport with WiFi. Regardless of what sort of device I use. A 2nd copy of every email pipes to my office pee-cee.

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Regards, Joerg

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Of course, NOW.

I was talking of way-back-when, to get text you needed a pager.

My point was the ability to run an executable, thus remote control via E-mail.

Should be pretty trivial to spit something out a serial or USB port. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
                     In wine there is wisdom,
                    In beer there is freedom,
                   In water there is bacteria
                                               - Benjamin Franklin