We're in the process of buying a cabin up in Truckee, a 3-4 hour drive from home. That's serious snow territory, so I was figuring we could set up a remote-access home automation system. We'd like to monitor a few in/out temperatures, control the thermostat, maybe some lights, and a couple of cams would be cool. Decent DSL is apparently available.
Any advice/recommendations/warnings?
Truckee very often has the record low city temperature in the contiguous USA, especially in the summer. They can have frost any day of the year. Tomorrow's prediction is 85F high, 34 low. Sounds like a good candidate for some sort of heat storage system.
BobW has advocated that protocol and manufacturer before. Joerg said service-wise he had a bad experience with that manufacturer on a different product line. Jeff L echoed the thumbs-up for the protocol and listed a different manufacturer--one of many.
I associate the ancient BSR protocol with X-10 (the company) who exploited pop-up ads so. In case anyone recommends them, I think avoiding that bunch of vermin is a good plan.
On a sunny day (Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:33:02 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
PS and the cams, how about a couple of DCS-900 ? Just make sure the mains supply is clean, mine sometimes choke on mains pulses, possibly also RF spikes. Using shielded ethernet cable helped, but it still happens once a year, power down up the camera clears it, so provide a relay for that perhaps. Linux driver I wrote too:
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But you won't need it as it has a web interface, but I could never understand or get that MS windows software running that came with it.
Yup, there's a heap of zwave stuff. This is impressive...
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RF master dongle plus software for $49. I wonder if its RF range is limited by the tiny size. I'd feel better with a more macho antenna.
I could get one of those little fanless cube PCs, an Atom CPU maybe, and stash it in a closet somewhere, and let it run the show. Maybe a couple of cams to keep an eye on the bears.
The "downtown", the old mining town part near the railroad station, is pretty jumpin' day and night. Much of the rest is fairly quiet, especially in the off seasons... 13K residents in 38 square miles. If you want action, go to Reno.
I live in a city, at about 48x Truckee's density, so a little quiet is welcome.
If you use internet, get the security right first. Using a VPN tunnel is the least you should have. There is tons of stuff out there but be prepared to spend some serious cash if you want it to work reliably (no power cycles required to get things working again) and remote controlled over internet. Or you can build it yourself :-)
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Programmeren in Almere?
E-mail naar nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
On a sunny day (Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:14:42 GMT) it happened snipped-for-privacy@puntnl.niks (Nico Coesel) wrote in :
Not being able to power cycle would be a big mistake, especially if he wants to use a flup-atom-computa Of course this is s.e.d and buying usually misses out on all the fine things one wants anyways. That thing from z wave does it even have decent analog inputs, mm for 16 Euro you can buy a 3 part wireless light control here at 'gamma', now it would be more fun to crack its many codes and make a small 400MHz xmitter connected to an ethernet board, but anyways you need NAT translation, a modem / router, perhaps swicth too. Not sure a tunnel would help much. So far nobody managed to get through my NAT table. A PC would perhaps make things less reliable, ESPECIALLY IF IT RUNS A MS PRODUCT, and the REBOOT is a MUST and RE-INSTALL TO, remotely, for which you need a second PC and large disk backup, DVD drives, and a third PC with an OLD version of XP as emergency rescue.. whoaaaaaaa
On a sunny day (Tue, 9 Sep 2008 04:07:22 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Klaus Kragelund wrote in :
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Right, I got wise many years ago with 'cameras' when somebody installed one with my software on a building site in ... Mexico.. (I am in Europe), and he was elsewhere... ?Sometimes? the thing would lock up (the computa), and he would have to go there... To this day it is not known what exactly caused it, but I still think it was some kernel module that tried to do things that should have been unloaded.
Small computa[s] .. reliability.... I can get my eeePC to lock up by playing one specific DivX movie via the WiFi. The same movie from USB stick only causes a hickup. So, and only a long press on the power button to kill it, and then again to restart it, gets it alive again. How difficult is it to send a 'halt' instruction (accidently?). Or does x86 no longer have 'halt'? I remember I wrote this little program called 'halt', it kills anything. But that was in 486 times... Murphy: If it can happen it will happen. The DCS-900 camera soft I wrote will continue if the camera malfunctions, and _could_ provide a signal for some power cycling hardware. Problem with all that wireless stuff for security cameras is that it is useless, as any attacker can jam that frequency band. Reviving once a day is no good either, my soft reports date and time the connection to the camera is lost (ethernet cable cut by intruder, Yogi Bear chewing on cable), it is at that time you need to power cycle, but of course cut cables stop everything. My router is very reliable (so far), has it's own firewall. I would recommend in an application like that to program the firewall (on the PC and / or in the router) to only accept connections from known IP addresses, on known ports, IP tables is great in all that.
Truckee is close to Tahoe, Reno, and Sacramento, so there are things to do if you get bored. It's also very close to skiing, fishing, hiking, rafting, etc.
There is an airport. They do soaring out of it, which is a real thrill, since they get mountain wave. The views of the mountains are incredible.
Sounds great. You can probably get a very good deal on a cabin these days.
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