Adding fireplace control to your home automation

fireplace-automation

[James] has an admirable home automation system which he’s been working on for years. It does things like monitor the state of the garage door, control the lights, and it even notifies him of a power failure. One thing that wasn’t on the system yet are the fireplaces he has in his home. The hardware you see above is how Read the rest

NFC tags control your home’s lighting

nfc-controlled-home-lighting

Here’s a home lighting hack that doesn’t require you to think about it after the initial setup. Instead of requiring the user to launch an app and select a lighting state, it uses NFC tags to select a lighting configuration. The tags can be placed in different parts of the house so that setting your phone on the table beside … Read the rest

Complete Siri home automation controls everything but the kitchen sink

complete-siri-home-automation

[Elvis Impersonator] spent three full days but in that time he managed to hand control of everything in his house over to Siri. The technique used is a familiar one. A Raspberry Pi running SiriProxy listens for commands from the iPhone and acts on them based on [Elvis'] predefined configuration. The difference here is that it’s not just a … Read the rest

Rack Mount Home Automation with a RPi

RPi Home Automation

[Patrick] wanted to have centralized sensing and control over various parts of his house. His Raspberry Pi Home Automation System integrates a bunch of functionality in one rack mount package, salvaged from an old network switch.

The automation system is based on a Raspberry Pi running Arch Linux, which talks to an ATmega over SPI. We’ve seen this setup used … Read the rest

The Universal Geospatial Light Switch

project rita

Home automation has existed in one form or another for quite some time, but we thought this take on controlling lights was quite interesting.  Instead of having a menu of lights that you can turn on and off, this Android app lets you point your phone at the device and turn it on or of. Undoubtedly similar to how [Darth … Read the rest

Humble beginnings of a home automation project

humble-beginnings-to-a-home-automation-project

This board is the start of [Steven Pearson's] quest to automate his home. The module will be used to prototype the rest of the project. Right now it uses an ATmega328 chip running the Arduino bootloader. This connects to one mechanical relay which we would wager is mains rated. The module will be controlled wirelessly via the wireless module … Read the rest

Google Talk used for home automation communications via Android

home-automation-using-instant-messaging

To call [Carnivore's] home automation project impressive would be an understatement. He’s pulled together a system that is fast, well presented, and easy to use. To interface with items in his home he’s using X10 modules, and this example simply switches some table lamps. But the underlying setup seems incredibly polished and should be a snap to extend for … Read the rest