A major outage at Amazon Web Services this morning left millions of people with broken home automation devices: door locks, heating, lights, ovens, even doorbells.
Don’t let your home automation system be dependent on external services!
I always keep two principles (or rules) in mind when building my own systems.
The main sales pitch for robot lawnmowers like the Husqvarna Automower is that you don’t have to mow your grass, ever again. It always looks neat. But there’s a second claim: that trimming the grass just a tiny amount each day also results in healthier grass. Time for a direct comparison of the main lawn area maintained by the Automower, versus a patch of grass that I have been mowing manually.
The magic of the Automower is that you hardly ever need to care about it. You can leave it for weeks or months, and it’ll take care of itself. However, there is one piece of maintenance that you need to perform: blade replacement. It’s quite easy and only takes a few minutes, and all you need is a screwdriver.
I have a lot of fun making SuperHouse videos, but recently I’ve been thinking about ways that I can make them better. I have many ideas for different types of videos and a list of about 50 episodes I want to make in the future. Please have your say in the future of SuperHouse!
Below is the original episode plan from the early concept for SuperHouse as a high-tech home renovation TV show. There were still some holes in it, but it gave us a rough outline for what we thought could be structured as a show something like a high-tech version of “This Old House”.
Season 1
#1: Welcome to the SuperHouse
SuperHouse introduction
Montage of future topics
Demo of RFID door
Demo of mobile phone control of blinds
Field trip: Clipsal training house, Clifton Hill
SMS letterbox notification project
Tour of the website highlighting detailed instructions for letterbox hack
#2: Wiring Your World
Introduction to smart wiring: X10/A10, CeBUS, Dynalite
Internet access options: DSL, cable, 3G, wireless
Setting up a router / firewall
Field trip: Tasmanian house fitted with CeBUS cabling
Building a stud wall
Installing a LAN/WLAN
Community wireless
#3: The Ultimate Garage
Building a steel-frame garage
Driveway detectors: magnetic and infra-red
Painting interior walls and trim
Field trip: Dad’s place to talk about building envelope etc
Recharge station for EV
Extraction fan for exhaust (auto-start car)
Hanging plasterboard
Wall insulation
Low power / efficient lighting options
#4: Front Door and Access Control
Hanging a front door
Fitting electric striker plates
RFID access control
Keypad access control
Fingerprint scanner access control
Facial recognition access control
Field trip: Brisbane airport access control system?
Doorbell notification / video surveillance
#5: Pets, Sensors, and Storage
Building a built-in cupboard
Installing an intelligent cat/dog door
Field trip: R&D: robotic fish, other robot pets?
Using temperature, humidity, smoke, CO, and gas sensors
Humidity-controlled bathroom and fans
#6: Walls (this ep is very weak, need to find more)
Plasterboard: hanging, finishing, painting
Cornices, corners, architraves, skirting boards
Field trip: South Korea: grass house and Ubiquitous Dream Hall
Introduction to Arduino
#7: The Ultimate Home Office
Door, desk, drawers, storage
Connecting up your computer and printer
Field trip: multi-location, maybe Jason Smith’s home office + another
Sharing peripherals (printer, scanner, etc)
Multi-line phone, VoIP
Video conferencing
Home server
Online apps: Google docs, etc
Mobile devices: smartphones and synchronization
#8: Roofs, Water, and Solar
Replacing a tile roof with steel
Installing a water tank
Connecting tank depth sensors to the HA system
Connecting hot water system to the HA system
Field trip: R&D: solar cells
Installing solar panels and a reverse-reading meter
Installing solar hot water boosting
Roof insulation options
Season 2
#1: Floors
Floor and wall tiling
Fixing a squeeky floor
Floor polishing
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?
#2: Fencing
Building a picket fence
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?
#3: Saving Water
Installing a water tank and rainwater collection system
Connecting depth sensors and pumps to the computer
Greywater: collection, purification, storage, use (legislation)
#4: Garden irrigation and lighting
Computer controlled sprinkler system
Installing garden lighting
#5: Video from everywhere
CCTV systems
Building a deck or verandah
Doorbell notification
#6: High-tech driveway
Installing electric driveway gates
Fitting a car sensor
CCTV feed to your car
#7: External walls
Replacing weatherboards
Rendering a brick wall
Exterior painting
#8: Heating and cooling
Installing central evaporative cooling
Installing central heating
Smart thermostat
Season 3
#1: Fireplace
Installing a gas fireplace
Connecting a gas fireplace to the computer
#2: Security
Using the house computer as a security system
Installing external security lighting
SMS notification
Dialler
Connecting motion detectors
Connecting smoke detectors
#3: Home entertainment
Installing a wall-mount flat-screen TV
Building a home media PC with MythTV
CCTV feeds to MythTV
#4: Control from anywhere
Building a house-wide audio system
Setting up a web interface for the house computer
Using a phone / iPod as a house controller
Connecting your house to virtual reality (Second Life?)
#5: Phones
Setting up a VoIP phone system with Asterisk
Connecting Asterisk to MythTV
#6: Curtains and blinds
Installing electric curtains and blinds
Linking curtains / blinds to the computer
#7: (Topic to be determined)
Linking an endless hot water system to the computer
Bursts of bad weather keep flooding the bottom of our garden, so I need to “pause” the Automower. I can’t send commands to it directly (yet) so I need another solution. I’ve connected a Belkin WeMo WiFi power controller to the base station, so that I can use my phone to disable the mower without splashing around in the rain.
The Husqvarna Automower relies on a boundary wire to tell the mower when it needs to stop and turn around. This is *really* important if you have a drop-off in your garden, like I do at the moment! If the mower can’t detect the boundary, it could drive itself right over a tiny cliff, or into a pond, or something dangerous like that. So what happens if the power fails while the mower is operating, and the boundary wire stops working? Let’s try it and see what happens!
The second annual Society of Monash Electrical Engineers Robot Building Competition saw about 150 competitors spend a weekend building robots to solve a specific challenge. Their robots needed to follow a line down a track, detect when they approached a gate, sense the colour of the gate, transmit that colour to the course control computer using an RF transmitter module, wait for the gate to be opened, proceed to the next gate, and repeat until they reached the finish line. The finish line is a line across the track that matches the colour of the last gate, so they also had to detect multiple cross lines and ignore the ones that were the wrong colour.
The challenge turned out to be too complicated to complete within the time allowed, so it was simplified a little during the competition.
Freetronics was a major sponsor of the competition, providing prize packs for the first 4 place teams plus a bonus prize pack for a “best bling” category judged by me purely on who made the coolest looking robot.
