Home Automation (and how it saved me money)

[NeoMorph]

Eric wanted some info on my home automation project so here it is.

One of the problems with my disability is every flipping winter it turns me into "little old man" mode. This means even moving from room to room is a pain in the ass. Left a light in in the hallway and living room when I went to bed?... I left them on overnight because it was just too painful to go turn off... I also left PC's running and HiFi's too...

I was losing a ton of money on wasted electricity because of it. Something had to be done.
I had done a small project using a Commodore 64 project while doing an electronics course. It was only using the parallel port connected to opto-isolator circuits but using a few relays I managed to turn a few lights on and off automatically. That was when it started the bug that is similar to the home cockpit bug (actually started at the same time for me as I had FS II on the Commodore 64 as well).
Well as I say, 4 major iterations later and now I have a little black cube in the living room PC that has no moving parts (so no annoying whirring while watching TV) that is connected to a couple of Vellman USB Experiment boards which then interfaces with an RF transmitter system that I built. This is connected to lights and plug sockets around the house.

If I leave a room for any length of time a LUA script decides if I'm coming back or not and then sends commands to the lights, PC's, HiFi etc to shut down. When I go into the living room and sit down and decide to watch a Blu-Ray it means turning on the BR player, HiFi, TV, change to the right channels on the HiFi and TV, turn the lighting to the correct level for that time of day and light level and only then can I settle down... or it did at any rate.

Nowadays I sit down, decide to watch a BR and press one button on my remote and all the settings and lights are set automatically while I choose the exact BR disk to watch. Finish watching, I press another button and it all turns off.

There are a bunch of other things it does around the house (like controls the HiFi from an old Saitek PC-Dash in the bathroom and a NAS box that feeds videos to a Hi-Def player in the living room and bedroom for example) and you would think that it would eat electricity. In fact it has saved me so much over the years that it has let me buy loads more "toys" to keep me happy. Before this last incarnation I was actually living week to week. Now I have been able to save enough to do other projects too (which is the only reason I'm thinking of building a cockpit now).

I wrote a testimonial three years back on the site that I bought the automation development software from. http://www.promixis.com/example_hc.php
Hmmm... I wonder if I could use Girder and NetRemote to control my cockpit too... Oooh...