Our Digital House

In the early 1990s we started adding various home automation features to our home. The goal was to make additions that improve our lives, not simply add high-tech gadgets.

We have slowly worked on this since, spending the odd Saturday trying new features and tweaking things. Some ideas failed, and we got tired of other features.

Other cool home automation ideas and links

It would be very interesting to monitor utility usage. The meters are not designed to give consumers this information, but there are people running various optical sensors to collect the data anyway.

Dan Klein is deep into this stuff. http://www.klein.com/thermd.

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@FreeBSD.org) has an interesting set of pages on this at http://phk.freebsd.dk/Gasdims/.

You may have noticed that we get our X10 stuff from Smarthome, not x10.com. I've found that the web pages are easier to use at Smarthome, and the constant X10 click-under browser windows tick me off! This is not the first company whose marketing tactics have repelled us: a series of dinner-time calls from MobilExxon pursuaded us to cut up our cards and shop elsewhere, after 20 years of loyal service. But this is the wrong place for a rant.

Links to Other Related Projects we Wished We Had Thought Of