SuperHouse Vlog #53: Help! The Internet killed my toaster!

Posted on March 1st, 2017

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.

Rule #1: No external dependencies.

Rule #2: Mechanical overrides.

SuperHouse Vlog #52: Automower grass quality

Posted on February 19th, 2017

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.

SuperHouse Vlog #51: Automower blade replacement

Posted on February 11th, 2017

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.

SuperHouse Vlog #50: The future of SuperHouse

Posted on February 6th, 2017

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!

The Patreon page is at www.patreon.com/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
  • ?
  • ?

#2: Fencing

  • Building a picket fence
  • ?
  • ?
  • ?

#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
  • Computer controlled water feature
  • The ultimate cubby house: VoIP
  • Voice control
  • Swimming pool management

#8: Grand Finale

  • “Live” show from the SuperHouse
  • House tour showing everything in place
  • Giveaway / prize draw for the crowd
  • Auction the house live on TV? Mmm, tempting!

SuperHouse Vlog #49: Automower security features

Posted on January 12th, 2017

The Husqvarna Automower has several built-in security features, to help reduce the risk of your expensive robot being stolen.

SuperHouse Vlog #48: Pausing the Husqvarna Automower in bad weather

Posted on November 22nd, 2016

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.

SuperHouse Vlog #47: Husqvarna Automower power failure behaviour

Posted on November 15th, 2016

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!

SuperHouse Vlog #43: SMEE Robot Building Competition 2016

Posted on September 9th, 2016

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.

SuperHouse Vlog #41: Motion detectors and physical therapy

Posted on July 20th, 2016

New motion detectors for the Arduino / OpenHAB home automation system finally arrived! But before I test them I need a session with my therapist.

SuperHouse Vlog #40: Out with the halogen, in with the LED

Posted on July 19th, 2016

Sometimes you can’t just replace halogen globes with LED globes. This time I got lucky.