Home Automation: Revisited.
By john on Feb 22, 2008 in featured
So my Birthday back in January gave me some discretionary funds to play with. It turns out that’s my very favorite kind of funds, the discretionary kind.
I decided I would use some of the money to create a proof of concept for an easy way to control lights (particularly lamps) in my house. I decided to tackle one room at first and see how that went. I also decided to avoid anything that would require any wiring – I can’t do that right now. I intend for this system to work when I move into an apartment in the next few months.
So, I picked up some devices and software from SmartHome. I was directed there by my friend Jason who has a similar setup going in his place.
The specific devices I got were a PowerLinc USB INSTEON adapter to hook into my mac automation server, a lamplinc dimmer module and an appliancelinc module (for my lamp that has a CFL bulb that can’t be dimmed). The software I’m using is Indigo 2.0 – not cheap but it does look to be pretty powerful – great for expansion in the future. It also supports both X10 and INSTEON, so I should be pretty well covered there.
The install was pretty easy – I plugged in the wall warts and the lamps into those, then hooked in the usb adapter into my mac. The Indigo software required two installs – the first to install the main package (requiring a reboot, boo!) and the second to install a patch to make it work with Leopard. After that I cleared out all the “installed by default” settings and devices and linked to the USB adapter. That took all of 2 minutes. After that I had to link each of the wall warts to the indigo software, which was another minute of work.
I then setup a control page that would allow me to control the lamps via a web page (on my iPhone). The real neat thing here is that you can use an image of your floor plan and set devices up on that image as they would be in the real room. Since I don’t HAVE a image of my floor plan (anyone know of any resources to use to make one?) I used one that was included. It doesn’t look like the room, or even close, but it was good enough for a proof of concept.
now, I can browse to my mac from my iphone, see the devices on the floor plan, click on them and have them turn on.
I can do this from anywhere in my house (and, using VPN, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection).
Pretty sweet. I know for a fact that i’m not using hardly any of the neat features that Indigo has to offer, but I plan on exploring it more over the weekend. I may post something more about it next week as I learn new things.
I’m certainly pleased right now.
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