Recently I picked up an Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave LED Light Bulb, Gen5 on sale from Amazon just to check out and compare to my Hue bulbs. I like Zwave as it’s generally easier to control from my HS system and I don’t have to kludge it or control from a 3rd party plugin or through IFTTT which means it’s going to be quicker to respond.
The included directions tell you how to pair it to your controller (and remove if you need to) and that’s pretty much it. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not particularly understandable to any normal human being and once I started nodding off I had to stop reading. Anyway, I paired it with HomeSeer pretty quickly and immediately set out to try and control it. All I could get it to do was turn off and on like any other regular light bulb or smart switch. Rather than being smart and looking around the HomeSeer forums I got pissed off and set up a return to Amazon and then ordered two more from the HomeSeer store. As always, their shipping was pretty quick and so I paired to two new ones (I still had #3 sitting on my desk) and got the same results. At that point I figured out I had to be doing something wrong and started researching.
What they don’t tell you… in the box… or on Amazon… or at the HomeSeer store… is that you have to set warm and cold white OFF in order to be able to change colors. Oh, that’s obvious. Not. Anyway, now that I know that it’s pretty easy but there should be a “dummies Guide to…” or something for the normal dumbasses like myself.
Here’s how the lamp shows up on my HomeSeer devices management page. Notice the whites are turned off.
The light bulbs themselves are comparable to Hue and using Homeseer events I can control them through my Amazon Echo’s in the house. They, and the Hue bulbs for that matter, can be controlled by telling Alexa to “turn on the…” but unfortunately you can’t change colors that way. Hue of course has their own app and you can use the color wheel. You can control the Hue bulbs as well as these with an RGB picker on the devices page as well. That’s fine for a geek but what about the wife and kids? For that I had to set up a series of events. One for each color. Then I use an IFTTT trigger so all they have to do is say “Alexa, trigger living room blue” or whatever. The downside of that is that I have to manually set up an event for each color I think they might want. Meh. It’s cool but nothing we could live without.
Here’s what one of them looks like…
The lighting is nice. They give off enough brightness to see but not so much glare that it interrupts while watching a movie.
There is really only one thing I truly dislike about the bulbs and it makes it almost impossible to use in most of my lamps. It’s the damned size. These things are fucking HUGE.
On the left is a standard old light bulb like you would purchase anywhere. On the right is the Aeon Labs bulb. It’s a good inch and a half taller. Length definitely isn’t everything, at least in this case. It just so happens that my two living room lamps have tall thingamajigs that hold my lamp shades on so it worked out perfectly. I don’t have a single other lamp in the house that the third one will fit in. I thought about putting it in my bathroom over the tub and the glass cover wouldn’t fit. Rather than replace lamps in the house I’ll be buying Hue bulbs next time even though I have to work a little harder to include them in my Home Automation network.
Browsing around Reddit this afternoon I ran across a relatively new product that looks to be pretty neat. It’s called DreamScreen. Basically it’s a series of LEDs that you stick on the back of your TV like you would with a Hue strip. The main difference is that with DreamScreen they include an HDMI splitter. You hook the DreamScreen HDMI controller into it along with your video source (Fire TV, Chromecast, an HDMI cable from your AV receiver, whatever you want) and then run that to your TV. The DreamScreen controller has Bluetooth so you can pair your phone (android or ios) to it and manually control the lights as well as to set it to audio or video mode. It looks like the developers are also working on allowing you to control your Hue lights when it’s in Ambient mode as well.
Since you are running both your source and controller through the splitter, it reacts to the digital content that goes through and judging from the video (and a couple of unboxing videos on Youtube) it reacts fairly quick to changes in lighting on the TV. Here’s a promo video from their web site.
This was a Kickstarter that is over now but you can pre order the LEDs and controller from their web site, linked at the bottom of the post. It’s not terribly expensive, starting at $139 for enough to fit a 32-42″ TV and there are two larger sizes as well. You can also just order replacement or extra LEDs as well. They start at $50 which is comparable to RGB LEDs that you might pick up at Home Depot or Amazon. Yeah, you can get the Milights that are much cheaper but they aren’t specifically made for your TV.
Hoping I can pick up a set after payday, although it might wait a while. Have a roof to replace 🙁 but that’s another story for another day.
Anyway, once I’m finished posting this I’m going to shoot them an email or tweet as I have some questions. It would be nice if there was an api that I could access so as to control them from Homeseer or through MQTT and then back to HS. I haven’t thoroughly looked around their site yet so there very well may be one. At the very least I could always power the LEDs with a Zwave plug for on/off control. I’ll update the post with whatever info that they send me.
I think I may have posted elsewhere that I have a Wink Connected Home Hub. Apparently they are currently beta testing a Vacation mode subscription that’s going to cost $9.99 a month. What the holy hell?
If the Wink hub weren’t only using half it’s sensors, that only work half the time, on a hub that’s only online half the time….I could see paying $9.99 for a year of service. I pay $30.00 a year or so for the premium myhomeseer service. I don’t really need dynamic dns as I have a subdomain already mapped here but it’s nice with the HStouch android client and I can also set up multiple accounts for everyone’s IFTTT accounts in the house.
The “vacation lights” that Wink is supposedly rolling out? Already part of HomeSeer through events with NO INTERNET CONNECTION needed.
If you are a big Wink user I can see where it might be useful though. Let me know if this is something you might use.
So in Part I I touched on most of the hardware I’m using and some of my software. I keep coming across stuff I missed and I’ll mention some of that here.
So on to how all this works together. Down among the creepy crawlies that inhabit my garage and basement along with my son’s defunct 1990 Firebird lives the brains behind my house. Homeseer. It’s a piece of software that I’ve been using since 2000. I have tried probably 50 or 60 different packages over the years and also some dedicated hardware solutions (such as the Wink Hub) and not a single one of them can do everything that Homeseer can. Nothing even comes close. Unfortunately that also means a bit of a learning curve. You can just set up the hardware, the software and a few plugins and actually have a pretty decent automated home but for the depth of control I like it takes a bit of time (16 years worth lol)
A small portion of the 500+ devices shown on the web page of my automation software.
Homeseer is extended using plugins (as well as VB scripting if you want). The plugins I am currently using are
BLGarbage (this just helps to keep things running smoothly)
BLRF – for X10 RF signals
Blue-Iris – controls and receives information from Blue Iris, which is running on a PC in my bedroom. This is the heart of my CCTV security.
EasyTrigger – better event triggers. More on events later.
HSTouch Server – for touchscreen clients including Android and iPhone smartphones, windows clients (my Asus touchscreen) and tablets.
JowiHue – Sends and receives information to my Hue Bridge. This is the part that failed in the video in part one. That or the bridge itself. It definitely is not as reliable as Zwave lighting and while the Hue lights are cute they will end up being replaced.
NetCAM – Allows for snapshots of my network cameras. Now that I’m using the Blue Iris plugin I’ll be retiring this soon.
Random – Using this with some of the other plugins and text to speech so that when Homeseer talks with us it will use different phrsing and words and not always sound the same. I haven’t really done much with this yet. Never enough time.
Restart – Allows me to restart Homeseer if needed without having to remotely log into the server.
RFXCOM – I touched on this one earlier. It pulls in info from my Oregon Scientific weather sensors (including the ones that aren’t connected to the base station due to compatibility. Some of the sensors have died over time so I have replaced them with cheaper ones, which the base station doesn’t read. I upload all of my weather data to Weather Underground and WeatherBug. The software that I use for that (VWS) sends most of the info and I use a VB script to send the missing info that RFXCOM picks up. RFXCOM also receives the RF signals from my old X10 security sensors that I haven’t repleaced yet.
SCBULLET – A pushbullet plugin. I have it set up but not doing much with it yet as far as notifications
Tasker Plugin – There is so much I could say about this. I saw a quote from someone on the Homeseer forums that goes something like “Tasker, for a Home Automation enthusiast is like hitting a drug addict in the face with a big bag of crack”. Tasker is awesome. When I go to listing some of the things I’m able to do we’ll touch on Tasker.
TextSeer – a simple receiver for sending controls to homeseer over the web. While I can use JSON to do the same thing, TextSeer allows me to use HTTP GET with my BBS software and other stuff. It makes it very simple.
UltraGCIR3 – this allows me to control my IR stuff. TV, receiver, etc.
UltraMon3 – Monitors stuff on my network. I have this running but don’t really use it as much anymore. I have switched to a more robust set of scripts and local control over each computer in the house.
VWS – pulls in the info from my weather station.
The Oregon Scientific Base Station. The VWS software is running on my PC and sends it’s info to services in the cloud as well as to CSV format which the VWS plugin reads
weatherXML – Weather information but much more than that. Alerts, maps, etc.
X10 – While X10 is very old, not 100% reliable and a bit outdated, I still have switches and motion sensors that have worked for the last 16 years. In the past I’ve used the X10 CM15 controller, the Applied Digital Ocelot (I think this one died due to a lightning strike several years back) and am currently using a TI103 X10 controller. One of the reasons I am moving over to Zwave is that even though I have a coupler wired into my breaker box and another one plugged into my dryer the X10 does not always seem to send the signals to the switches and other appliances. For instance, if you open my side door (which we let the dog out of at night) my side and front porch lights come on and will then turn off after 15 minutes of no motion. My front porch is Zwave and always immediately responds. The side porch is X10 and sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it’s four or five seconds and occasionally it just never switches on. That’s a no-go as far as I’m concerned for an automated home. It’s also the reason I don’t want my shit cloud controlled. When you hit the light switch it should just immediately come on. There should never be a delay.
XBMC – I use Kodi on my bedroom PC occasionally and this allows me to control it when I do. More on that…
Z-Wave – I used to use an Aeon Labs Zwave controller but updated last year to a Homeseer Zwave Smartswitch+
Kinect – This plugin is actually running remotely on the Asus touchscreen in my living room.
Alexa plugin – I mentioned that Homeseer has Echo support built in. It does. What this plugin does is allow me to use ANOTHER instance of Alexa on my bedroom PC without having the Echo in there. It runs remotely like the Kinect plugin. I can have as many instances of this as I need. With it getting warmer there will be stuff we’ll be working on in the garage (where my Homeseer server is) and I will probably install Alexa on that too. The only caveat to having software instances of Alexa rather than the Echo or Dot is that it doesn’t support media (Pandora, etc) but there are workarounds for that.
I think that’s all of the plugins I am currently running so here are some of the things the system does.
There are currently two (really three) voice recognition systems at work in my house. One is Alexa. As seen in the video and countless other ones on Youtube the recognition is awesome and there is a lot of stuff you can do. “Alexa, tell Domino’s to order my Easy Order” worked great last night when it was just me and Tootsieroll eating dinner. Obviously I can also control my lighting, TV and somewhat my thermostat. It does have it’s limitations though. I currently have 581 devices attached to Homeseer. Not all of those are hardware obviously. Some are virtual devices that control other ones. The Echo (Alexa) can control stuff that is able to be specifically controlled by Off, On, Dim or it can set heating or cooling to a specific temperature. You can’t chain commands with it.
The second voice recognition system I use is Homeseer itself. I have a little piece of software running on each PC and laptop called HomeSeer speaker. It acts as a remote text to speech client for Homeseer and can send announcements to all or specific clients. I can also turn on the recognition so in addition to “Alexa”, “Jarvis” lives in my house. With Jarvis I can tell Homeseer to turn on the air in 15 minutes and set it to 72. Or I can set the virtual device “Alarm” to “home” in twenty minutes. There really isn’t much I can’t do with Homeseer Speaker. The problem with Homeseer Speaker’s voice recognition that I’ve found over the years is that it sucks balls. It’s an awesome idea and a great back end but the implementation is so fucking awful it’s basically unusable. That’s why, even though Google Now and Alexa work through the Internet, I use them anyway.
That brings me to the third one I mentioned above. I use Tasker on my Nexus 6 as do my wife and youngest daughter. My oldest has an iPhone so she’s shit out of luck. With Tasker and a couple of plugins I can say “Ok Google, turn on the TV, change to FireTV, lock the front door (yeah, I found one on eBay that hopefully will be here soon) and dim the living room lamps”. Yeah, that’s where the awesome sauce kicks in. Can’t do that shit with Alexa. It does mean that your phone has to be with you but who doesn’t always have their phone. Or does it? On my todo list is adding Tasker to the two Nexus 7s in my house so we don’t have to have our phone with us. Oh by the way, my Moto 360 is also connected to Tasker through my phone so as long as it’s in range and they are both connected to wifi, I can just talk to the watch like Dick Tracy.
That’s Me!
Some of the other things Homeseer does?
If it’s between November and March and the temperature is under 59 outside the heat kicks on the a specific setting, It’s a little lower at nighttime. From May to October it’s the air that kicks on but as I mentioned earlier, only if the windows are closed.
When you open the door to the basement stairs the lights kick on in the stairway as do the ones in my basement and garage. If it’s the garage door the same thing. They cut off after fifteen minutes, IF no motion has been detected. If I flip the lights on, off, on they are overridden and will stay on until I cut them off.
If it’s nighttime and motion is detected outside by any of my motion detectors the flood lights and porch lights cut on until no motion has been detected. Same thing if Blue Iris detects motion on the cameras. Lights on. When I open the side door at night the porch lights come on and then go off fifteen minutes after no motion detected. If the front door is opened at night the foyer light, front porch lights and driveway floods come on and then will turn off fifteen minutes later if there’s no motion. That’s particularly useful when I leave for work at 6:15am and my hands are full.
When the washing machine is in use and then stops (watts in use) it tells everyone in the house, hey, the clothes are finished. Put them in the dryer. Once it has been out of use for a period of time it completely cuts the power to the Zwave switch. You know that most appliances still use a minute bit of power even when not in use. Not my washing machine. Or my daughter’s monitor for that matter, which she tends to leave on. Eventually most of my appliances will be hooked to Zwave switches as well. Even if I just save 50 cents or a dollar a month when you have 50 items running, TVs, monitors, washer and dryer, etc…it all adds up.
If motion is detected in the house when we aren’t at home it sends the wife and I email alerts along with pictures. If the basement windows are opened it sets off and alarm and starts flashing lights around the house. If my CO/Smoke detector in the kitchen (the only connected one I have so far) goes off it of course sounds, but my basement alarm sounds, all the lights start flashing off and every speaker in the house starts shouting shit about fire or carbon monoxide and it also sends us emails and text messages.
My basement control center. After 16 years of hooking shit up it’s embarrassing the wiring mess I have down there. On my todo list for this summer is to clean it up and rewire everything.
When I get close to the house my driveway and porch lights come on at night and the system announces Daddy’s home. It drives my dog nuts.
If we are on vacation and motion is sensed anywhere outside random lights go on and all the outside lights go on. It also sends the obligatory emails and text messages along with pics.
I’m in the slow process of writing a series of Alarm Events so we can set an alarm when we leave to trigger other events.
I have a counter set so it has started tracking when we change the HVAC filter and it will tell us when it needs to be changed.
Less automation but more information, Homeseer scrapes my BBS for info and I can see who is logged in, how many calls I’ve had and other various info. It also pulls in a few RSS feeds so I know when the last show has been updated and I can download the torrents, pulls in horoscope and also news feeds. It’s supposed to read me the top headlines when my alarm is dismissed in the morning and also tell me if it’s a holiday but I’m debugging that I guess.
If there’s a NOAA weather alert for the area it announces it to everyone.
That’s most of the items currently. 90% of it happens whether there’s internet connection or not.
I have a streaming music server on a Raspberry Pi and my entire music library on an NAS. It runs Subsonic, a streaming server. It doesn’t get much use but that’s mainly because I have set up obvious clients for everyone. Unlike Pandora, iHeartRadio, Play Music or Amazon, no internet needed. There are clients but I just mainly use the html interface and can cast it to any of my chromecasts oh by the way.
Subsonic web interface login
There are a thousand other things my automated home does and can do that I can’t think of at the moment but the stuff above gives a good general idea anyway.
Some things in varying stages of completion I have that will be added shortly include,
A smart mirror. I actually have all of the materials next to my desk for this. Basically it’s a see through mirror with a Nexus 7 behind it that supplies pertinent information for day, camera feeds, etc. Voice controlled. There are more intensive projects out there that I’ve seen that use a raspberry pi and touchscreen monitor but I went the cheap route. Still a wow thing. I haven’t decided when I’m going to place it.
A Raspberry Pi based emulator running Nintendo and Super Nintendo games to mention a few. That’s 90% complete. I thought I had an old NES in my basement that I was going to gut and put everything inside but I can’t find it (I think it didn’t survive a rare spousal purge of crap) so I’m going to gut my old Nintendo Xbox 1 and put everything inside.
Mounting my projector to my bedroom ceiling and running the wires (I am thinking about living room actually). It will take the place of my bedroom television. It has HDMI inputs so I can hook in my chromecast. I have a ceiling mount and another FireTV stick on the way (my poor poor discover card.) I will also be able to control it with IR and in turn run it via voice or touch screen control via phone. The extra TV I’ll either hook to my desk or set up a gaming station next to my daughter’s computer in the living room and hook up the unused Xbox 360. Nobody here does a lot of console gaming but it’s nice when there’s company.
Front door. I managed to get a steal on a Zwave motorized deadbolt. It’ll be here eventually and I’ll add it into my system. Probably have it unlock when I drive up. Not trigger by motion but by our phone’s proximity. Nice to be able to remotely let people into the house as well without having to give them a key. It was an open box deal but I can return it if it doesn’t work.
A software based alarm system. I mentioned I was working on that but it’s a long way from completion. I’ve barely touched on the capabilities of Blue Iris as well as the scripting that Homeseer provides so this will be a fairly robust system. I’m not willing to pay monthly fees for monitoring so this is the next best thing.
Incorporating using more JSON into the interface so I will have more control of the automation aspects through the BBS, my web site, and all of the internal stuff. We use Plex in addition to Kodi because it just works well with browsers as well as the FireTV Stick. I have eventghost on most of the computers and will be adding more control over/from that as well.
More/better voice control options.
Touch support. I have rudimentary touchscreen clients on our phones and in the kitchen but I need to update the screens and provide more control.
I have a shit ton of old stuff I need to sell that I haven’t had the opportunity to list but will soon. If you’re looking for any of this stuff let me know and we’ll work out a deal. This includes an iPhone 5 no idea the size, HTC One (AT&T), Samsung Galaxy S3 (Verizon), Two Moto X (original, 2012 I think), an Ipod Touch and a Gameboy Color. Automation stuff includes an Applied Digital Ocelot and SECU16-IR. I think the IR controller is good but I haven’t been able to get the Ocelot to work. Many x10 switches, lamp and appliance modules, door/window sensors, in-wall switches, universal modules. Some are defunct but most are still in fine working order. They are from various manufacturers. Mostly X10 but some Radio Shack and a couple others as well. Most of that I’d prefer to just sell as one lump deal but I will consider selling seperately. A couple of netpads. Slow and Old. Considering throwing linux on them and using as netcams if I don’t sell them.
SO I’m a big gadget geek. As far as phones, while there is nothing wrong with Apple products my personal preference is for Android. The platform is much more extensible and I can do 1,000 more things with my Nexus than I ever would be able to with Apple. But…this isn’t about that.
I came across and article this morning entitled “The Perfect Smart Home: What our editors are using” over at Android Central, one of the sites I frequent. Each of them lists what they are using in their smart home and why. The question I had when I read the article is what about each thing makes their house smart? Each of the items, in itself, is pretty neat and I own several of them. The problem is that by themselves none of them make the house smart, at least not by my definition of the word. There are a couple that come pretty close, mainly Smarththings, but even that has it’s limitations. Most of them are limited by being able to connect to the Internet, for starters. What if you lost your internet connection? Most of the folks using these products are shit out of luck, including if you use Smartthings. From their web site:
Any locally executing SmartApps or Device Type Handlers still send events to the SmartThings cloud. This is necessary so that the mobile application can accurately reflect the current state of the devices, as well as perform any cloud-required services (e.g., sending notifications). In the event of an Internet outage, the events will be queued and sent to the SmartThings cloud when Internet is restored.
So what am I using? First off, bear in mind I’ve been using Home Automation for 16 years now and have used some really good (and some really crappy) products. For the most part I try to get things off of eBay or cobbled together from the parts that seem to inevitably collect around the desk of a gadget enthusiast.
Before I go into my set up we need to touch on why I don’t think a bunch of awesome gadgets make your house smart and what does. To begin with, it’s the controller. To have Home Automation, as opposed to Home Control, your house needs to do shit without you necessarily directing it to. All of your stuff also needs to work together. For instance, if one of us turns on the AC and there is a window open my house (HomeSeer) immediately turns it off and says something to the effect of “There is a window open, I have turned off the HVAC. Shut the windows and try again.” Eventually I’ll add logic which will cut it on once the window has been closed but for now we have to tell HomeSeer to turn it on once they are shut.
Here’s a quick video I shot right after I ready the article.
You’ll notice in the video that I am also using Alexa, which was mentioned in the Android Central article. I managed to get the Echo and remote while they were only being introduce to Prime members, for $99. If I had realized how cool it was I would have preordered another lol. As it is, I have an Amazon Dot coming sometime next month. That’s a piece of hardware Amazon is introducing to current Echo owners. It uses Alexa technology but insted of being a big speaker you hook your own speakers up to it. You’ll also notice my living room lights didn’t do dick when I told them to. I’ll touch on that a little later as well.
So here’s the hardware I’m using and then I’ll go on to describe what each piece does and how it fits together.
In my basement:
My basement control center. After 16 years of hooking shit up it’s embarrassing the wiring mess I have down there. On my todo list for this summer is to clean it up and rewire everything.
refurbished Dell Optiplex workstation. It runs the heart of my home automation system, the software Homeseer. Attached to that I have,
RFXCom receiver. It receives signals from my Oregon Scientific weather station I received for Christmas a few years ago. It also receives signals from a few other weather instruments as well as X10 security devices. I used to have the X10 Door/Window sensors on everything as well as a couple of glass break sensors. I’m now down to 4 window sensors as it’s an unstable and outdated technology that doesn’t always work. I have a shitload in a box I’ll be selling on eBay shortly if anyone is interested.
W800RF32 receiver AND a MR26a receiver for redundancy. These two pick up X10 RF signals from my few remaining X10 motion sensors as well as X10 remotes and stick-a-switch things. The W800 also receives X10 security device RF but I’ve found the RFXCOM and homeseer plugin does a better job. I am also slowly replacing the X10 motion sensors with Zwave as well. The timeline on that is just when I find a good deal on eBay or when they go on sale for deep discount at my local Home Depot.
HomeSeer Zwave Smartstick+, this is what controls most of my lighting. Zwave devices are slowly replacing X10 for reliability reasons as well as speed.
A shitty Samsung SDR-4001 CCTV system I picked up at Walmart a couple of years ago. Currently has four cameras attached. It’s locked down and you can’t access it with anything other than old versions of Internet Explorer and the Samsung software. However, I recently found a program that will pull in the video feeds. Blue Iris. More about that shortly.
Zwave door/window sensors on all the windows and the back door. Zwave light switch in the basement and a couple of GE Link light bulbs in the garage as well as the basement stairs.
Aeon Labs Zwave energy monitor directly attached to the breaker box.
In the living room:
Amazon Echo. Alexa. As Phil noted in the article I linked to, Alexa is one of the most exciting things to come out in the area in a long time. She’s sexy. So much so that they are literally flying off the shelves and besides being able to buy them through Amazon they are also available at Home Depot and Best Buy to name a couple. The voice recognition is so much better than the other system I use (part of Homeseer) that the devs from Homeseer added support. The one and only downfall to the Echo is that you have to be connected to the Internet. So I have redundancy and also use the Homeseer voice control as well.
really need to get that wiring cleaned up lol
A Global Cache GC-100-06 IR controller I got for a steal off eBay last week as a matter of fact. In the past I have used the USB-UIRT, eHome IR receivers (Windows Media Center) and an Applied Digital SECU16-IR (attached to the X10 controller I was using at the time.). The Global Cache controller works over the network and is a small form factor among my components.
Don’t mind the wires lol. I need to straighten that mess out.
The overhead light/fan is a Zwave switch. Lamps are Hue bulbs (just white, no color). While the Hue bulbs are pretty cool and I will probably eventually get a couple to play with, they are overly expensive and not 100% reliable. Again, something else that depends on the cloud.
Honeywell Zwave thoermostat
Xbox 360 Kinect (minus the Xbox360 which is put up on a shelf somewhere) connected to an Asus touchscreen laptop.
Foscam IP camera
JVC AV receiver and Vizio 42″ TV. Both controlled by the GC100-06 and Homeseer or obviously their own remotes. Hooked into them I have a Chromecast, a Chromecast Audio and a FireTV stick. The Chromecast Audio and FireTV stick are probably the two coolest things I’ve added over the last year besides the Echo. I used to have a huge Windows PC running BeyondTV and later, Windows Media Center. Now you can’t even see the devices I use.
Two of my last four X10 Window sensors.
Various Zwave motion, security and environment sensors.
Almost forgot, a Wink Hub (like Smartthings) and the only thing it still controls, a Quirky Pivot Power Genius
In the Kitchen:
Two more GE Link bulbs
Zwave light switch for the sink lights
Chromecast Audio attached to a pair of speakers that sit on top of the cabinets.
Petsafe Wireless Fence.
a couple of X10 lamp and appliance modules which control the pet’s water fountain and the lights inside my china cabinet.
mounted on the wall next to my light switches a Nexus 7 with a few things running, Homeseer HSTouch software, Google Play Music (to cast audio to the speakers) and IP Webcam Pro which in turn is picked up by Blue Iris, as are the rest of my cameras in the house. I’m actually going to be replacing this with an old iPad at some point soon.
In the bedrooms I have mixed Zwave and X10 lighting, another Vizio TV that’s controlled by a Global Cache itach IR controller, various X10 and Zwave motion sensors, door/window sensors, etc. In my laundry room there’s a GE Link bulb and a Zwave appliance switch plugged in to my washing machine and then the wall. It monitors energy consumption as well as some other stuff that I’ll touch on in part II of this article. Yes, I’ve managed to write so fucking long that I just decided I should split this up into two parts.
There’s a Wemo switch hooked to my upstairs Wifi Router (there’s another on in the basement. due to wifi connections I had to create two networks. The second one is basically just working in Access Point mode). I have it controlled through IFTTT and in turn, Homeseer (which also allows for built-in IFTTT integration).
Another Chromecast attached to my bedroom TV and a Chromecast Audio on my bathroom speakers. Once I get the Echo Dot I’ll stick the Chromecast Audio upstairs for the girls.
So how does all this crap fit together and what can it do? You’ll have to wait for me to finish typing Part II.
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 (and most modern thermostats it turns out) require a C wire (common ground.) It won’t power up without that bad boy. I ended up having to get a wire adapter thingy overnighted from Amazon just so I could hook the damn thing up.
It actually wasn’t too difficult fortunately. Got the thermostat wired up and placed on the wall and then had to tackle switching a couple of wires on the control board in the basement. All in all it took maybe 30-40 minutes. Then the fun started.
Somehow my router and homeseer server had turned off in the process which was weird as shit as I didn’t touch the breakers they are on. Once I had everything back online pairing the Honeywell to Homeseer was a cinch. Control from my HA page as you can see from the below pic.
A portion of the HA server web page.
Since I’m using Homeseer’s Amazon Alexa api for voice control that seems to be working ok. Still have some work to do on that though. It’s cool but not something I use all the time anyway. What’s nice is that I can set up heating/cooling schedules on my HA server (in addition to the thermostat itself) or just have it completely cut off during nice weather if I want.
I run a tech site. It’s just a small blog where I will occasionally post news and videos and such. I have never intended for it to be one of the huge gadget blogs, don’t consider it a ‘contender’ or anything like that. I just enjoy writing. I also run a very specific site targeted toward HTPCs and home automation, two of my hobbies. As a result I surf tech sites a couple times a month looking for cool new gadgets or software that I might be able to use or that I might want to post about.
Gadget Advisor is a relatively new site but one I seem to be going back to on occasion for the news and gadgets. What got me hooked was an article on the Logitech Harmony universal remote. Being an HTPC freak I enjoy reading about stuff like that and I will sometimes get a severe case of gadget envy at the same time. I wouldn’t use the Harmony simply because I use my own hardware/software solution that incorporates my HA stuff but if it weren’t for that it’s a pretty cool remote.
. Apparently they are currently beta testing a Vacation mode subscription that’s going to cost $9.99 a month. What the holy hell?
through events with NO INTERNET CONNECTION needed.
