When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, the lamp on my bedside table also turns on, to help me wake up, and its color indicates outside temperature: from red for warm through yellow and green to blue and violet for “it’s freezing outside”.
Continue readingopenHAB proxy items and groups
Lights in my home automation setup may be controlled multiple ways: by a physical switch hardwired to the light, by a button on a UI screen, or by a rule in response to some other events. To keep it simple, I combine the design patterns for Proxy Items,for Groups and for Associated Items. I define rules for the desired behavior at the level of a group, and then assign the lights to that group.
With this setup, the proxy item will always correctly reflect the status of the light, independent of what caused that status (command from a rule, gesture on a physical control, gesture on a UI element).
My Home Automation story, part 3: actual benefits and lessons learned
In the previous parts of this series I described my objectives for and anticipated benefits of my home automation system (part 1), and described the implementation (part 2). Now let’s have a look at which of the anticipated benefits I am really seeing today, after several years of use. I will also share some technical “lessons learned”.
Continue readingMy Home Automation story, part 2: Implementation
In part 1 of this series I told you about my objectives for and anticipated benefits of a home automation system. Today, in part 2, I’ll describe what I actually built. Part 3 will look at the real benefits of the system, after several years of use, and share some lessons learned.
Continue readingMy Home Automation story, part 1: Objectives
I decided to install some IoT equipment as an experiment, primarily to see if/how “home automation” would affect my behavior and decisions in daily life. I am basically using myself as a guinea pig, to study how technology will affect daily routine … and as a nice side effect, I get to dabble in electronics and embedded software!
Let me share with you how I designed and implemented a home automation solution in my house. The focus of these posts is not just on technology, on how I did it, but also on why I did it: what were my objectives? What were the expected vs the real benefits? Are there any lessons learned? This is about sharing my experience in defining and building something, not giving you my opinions on what you should want.
Continue readingWhy? Who? What?
Why am I writing this blog? Over the years, I have benefited from technical knowledge freely shared by others, and from Open Source software in particular. So now I feel it is time for me to give back, to share some of the insights I have had, and some of the code and schematics I have created, with the community. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll also admit that I see this as an opportunity to showcase my skills
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