Home Automation; Livejournal syndication
By john on Feb 5, 2008 in Home Automation, featured
I’ve been thinking about playing around with some home automation stuff, mostly just turning on lights remotely, dimmers and possibly timers. This has always been something that has interested me and there are a few methods available to allow me to do most of what I want without anything real fancy. A proof of concept demo’d to me by my friend Jason convinced me that I need to investigate this stuff further. Do any of you have any ideas on hardware and software to use for this? Ideally I’d like to have a way to remotely control some lights (for now) in my reading room. If I could do this from a web interface I could access on my iPhone, it’d be even sweeter. Oh yeah, and it needs to work on a Mac platform.
Once I figure out the hardware and software to use, and I get said hardware and software set up and working, I will post here detailing the setup that I’m using and my thoughts on how it was setting it up. Leave suggestions on hardware / software , or sites I should check out, in the comments.
In other news, as requested by Sayerbloke, I’ve got LiveJournal syndication of this blog set up. The syndicated user is ywgav_syn
Popularity: 8% [?]
The only one I’ve had personal experience of was a system used through the course of my work. I’ve controlled lighting and so on from a remote computer terminal, but it was using BMS outstations, which certainly wouldn’t be the best [or cheapest!] way of doing it. Oh, and the software wouldn’t run on a Mac. Well, it could be accessed over a web browser but that would require either a server running a Windows app or the addition of more expensive hardware.
sayerbloke | Feb 6, 2008 | Reply
The ones I’m looking at are from smarthome.com (www.smarthome.com) and are using INSTEON with plug in adapters. It’s not dirt cheap, but it’s also not prohibitively expensive. It’d be great for an apartment (which is where I’m likely to end up soon), and a great starting point for when I get a house.
Jason has some that he demoed to me, and it was using a web interface. I may try that, too, but wanted to see if anyone had any feedback on other solutions first.
Thanks for the thoughts
did the LJ feed work?
john | Feb 6, 2008 | Reply
“did the LJ feed work?”
Now about to find out.
sayerbloke | Feb 6, 2008 | Reply