Home Automation

New Gadget

So my thermostat crapped out yesterday after 16 years. Luckily it’s the time of year where it’s not a humongous deal. Picked up a Zwave thermostat on sale at Home Depot, which is awesome. Putting the damned thing in proved to be a trick. Only four wires in the thermostat but the one I got…Read more

Home Control

Finally finished the move of my home automation software off of my PC on to it’s own server (actually an unused laptop.) For a while I had it running on one of my Raspberry Pi’s but unfortunately with all of the logic and events it really bogged things down. Not only that but not all…Read more

Yet Another Reason I Won’t Be Using Spotify

  I signed up for Spotify when they first started and used it briefly. Really didn’t like it and it doesn’t offer me anything I don’t already use between Amazon Prime, Google Play Music and my 30,000 mp3 library. That having been said I can see where it could be useful to folks. I was…Read more

MiCasa Verde Vera 3 Review Part 2

… So after messing with the Vera for a couple of days and figuring out that I was not going to be able to get X10 working properly with my TI103 interface I broke down and ordered an Insteon PM from Amazon after a conversation I had with Doug Gregory from DKC Automation (a very…Read more

Vera 3 Review Part I

So a few months back my old laptop that ran Homeseer, my home automation software, finally died. I’ve used it for quite a long time and mostly ignored it. I’ve been running Homeseer for about 13 years now and ported my setup from a couple different PCs but always managed to save my configuration through…Read more