Home Automation

I’ve always wanted home automation - building a new house gave me the opportunity and excuse to finally implement it.

The product I use is called “Homeseer” and is a well established, well supported leading solution.  Key things I like about it, is the fact that its very extensible - you can write your own scripts and plugins. It supports a vast array of hardware and there’s pretty much always a google result for a particular piece of kit and homeseer integration available.

Due to security, I cant explain all of the features I have implemented on a public page. But suffice to say that I know what's happening in around the house all the time 24x7. I will try to detail some of the more interesting features and gadgets so you can get a feeling for what the system is capable of.

In my opinion HA is a nerdy thing - not really aimed at ordinary consumers yet.  If you want these sorts of things but cant learn and implement them, you are better of using a professional installer to get it working and look after it.

My key approach has been to make everything failsafe or have manual backups, so if the HA system fails things like the alarm system, heating and lighting will still work.  I consider this to be a crucial design approach.

Everything is controlled or monitored from my iPhone using the HSTOUCH feature - I’m no graphic designer, so screens tend to be functional rather than pretty.  I takes AGES to create nice graphics that you can run your fingers over - and quite frankly I get bored rather quickly.

Here are some of the screens I have available.

I can play background music around the house

All of my utilities are monitored for usage in real time - flush the toilet - that’s 5 liters...

I use 1-Wire sensors to monitor the temperature of every major room.

You can also see light-bulb icons - that’s for turning the lights on and off via Fibaro Z-wave modules.

Homeseer Automation software

Homeseer is a Windows application. Version 2.5 officially only runs on Windows XP, but I and many others run it on Windows 7 (x32 in my case).  Version 3.0 is out now, which is officially supported on Windows 7.

You can buy a Homeseer “Appliance” which is a PC appliance with homeseer pre-loaded. I chose to setup my own system using a small dedicated laptop. The reason for chosing a laptop is because its self-contained and having a battery inside it means it also has a battery backup in case of mains power loss.

I do have another dedicated server running virtual machines for email and file serving, which could also run the homeseer, but I chose to run a dedicated machine for automation. The reason is simple; reliability and stability is crucial. Even though the house wouldn’t stop functioning if the automation stopped or failed, it would be a mild irritation - therefore running it on a dedicated machine seemed the best approach.

Could you virtualise it?  Yes in theory, but many home automation devices and applications tend to use RS232 serial ports for connectivity - so you would need to ensure that you can pass through all that connectivity from the physical host into the virtual guest. I’ve been a virtualisation specialist for the last 10 years as my day job - but my home automation runs on dedicated ‘tin’ - go figure.

Here’s an idea of whats plugged into my laptop to give an understanding of the connectivity you may expect to need:

RS232 Connection to alarm panel

USB (RS232) connection to Current Cost energy monitor

USB connection for Z-Wave

RS232 connections for ADIO100 I/O boards

RS232 connection for automation of my Television (nerdy pointless thing!)

RS232 connection for modem

USB connection for Dallas 1-Wire

Audio speakers for announcements

Future RS232  connections for Home Cinema amplifier, projector and screen etc

People moan about RS232 as being old-school legacy connectivity - but the fact is that it’s simple , reliable, can be run over CAT5/6 structured cabling around your house and you will discover that lots of pieces of hardware have RS232 ports on the back of them, which means you can monitor and manage them.

I will be documenting the following subjects:

How I monitor the temperature of the house

How I send the kids to bed at night and wake everyone up in the morning

How I control and trigger lights.

Writing scripts to:

Monitor water, gas and electric usage, cost and leak detection.

Run the heating system

Turn the telly down if its turned up too loud!

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