Home Automation – Part 3 (System Design)
The overall system design for home automation offers many choices. The two extremes are highly decentralized and highly centralized. The decentralized is to have a subsystems for each functional area — security, audio distribution, solar shades, irrigation, etc. The centralized approach would utilize a central control computer to interconnect and supervise all activities and functions, […]
Home Automation – Part 2 (Planning)
The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don’t have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a […]
Home Automation Hobby
Home automation has been one of my hobbies for more than twenty-five years. In the early days it was mostly lighting control using X10 technology. There was a PC program written by a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center that calculated the precise time of the daily sunset and at that time signal went across […]
CoolSentry Devices On My House
CoolSentry Paging
You would think by now that there would be no pagers in use – it seems like everyone has a mobile phone. In fact, traditional pagers and paging services are on the decline, but there is valuable paging bandwidth that can be used for other purposes — like the CoolSentry program. Today, a technician from […]
