Home Automation Setup Keeps You Informed

[johannes] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, a home automation setup he named Botman. While he calls it a home automation system, controlling lights and home appliances (which it does wirelessly on 433MHz) is just a small part of its functionality. The front panel of Botman includes a servo which points to laser-etched icons of the current weather. It also has a display which shows indoor and outdoor weather conditions along with the status of public transportation around [johannes]’s house.

Botman is built around an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. The Arduino has very little memory, so [johannes] used the Google Apps engine as a buffer between his Arduino and the JSON APIs of his data sources. This significantly reduces the amount of data the Arduino has to keep in memory and parse.

[johannes] also wrote an Android app that communicates with Botman. The app has buttons for controlling lights in his house and duplicates all the information shown on the front panel. [johannes] also built some logging features into Botman. The temperature readings and other information are uploaded from the Arduino to a Google Docs spreadsheet where he can view and graph them from anywhere. Check out the video after the break to see Botman in action.

8 thoughts on “Home Automation Setup Keeps You Informed

  1. Neat idea, I’ve long had a super-personal dashboard on display in my house, displaying information relevant to me. Thinks like weather, if the wife’s train is running late, Google location history, a small “status” stream from my servers. The physical portion of this is neat, but that Server Horn could be made to look much nicer in just a few minutes. Quality build though. What is he using to control the lights?

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