(07-23-11) Automatic Kitchen Sink Light

Today I added an automatic kitchen sink light. I set up a motion detector to turn on the light whenever someone is in the kitchen, and then it will shut off again in a few minutes after the movement stops. All of the bits and pieces are X10 things that had been unused for a long time, so the only cost was about $8 for a fluorescent light.

It was a bit of a mess to drill the holes to hide the wires, but it was a fun project.

In other news, and thanks to the creator of the Digital Home Server (a very cool Home Automation front-end), I found www.supertweet.net, a site that allows old basic authentication to work with twitter instead of the new OAuth that Twitter has added for security. I'm so happy that my old twitter programs are working again. :)

(07-19-2011) Roomba Scheduling with EventGhost

Tonight I created an automated Roomba scheduler. I used EventGhost to record the "Clean" command from the IR remote and then play it back using a batch file. I then went into TaskScheduler to run the even every day at 9AM (This will be replaced with my own program - Chronos eventually). The hardware I'm using is a USBUIRT for the infrared input/output and the vacuum is an iRobot Roomba 530.

I would like to monitor the dock in the future to notify me of when the Roomba is docked or away.

Addendum: I thought that the Roomba dock might be issuing an IR command to tell the Roomba where the dock is, and that I might be able to read this and tell when Roomba was away. After some experimenting I have found this is not the case. Back to the drawing board.

(09-23-2010) New Touchscreen Interface

I created a new touchscreen interface to display weather, radar and news data. The main difference in this interface is that it uses DirectX to make the animation much smoother.

(09-20-2010) GetData program

For my home automation suite I created a page scraping utility to get weather data (temperature, humidity, UV, pollen, astronomical data, etc), movie release information (both theatrical and home releases), news (a wide selection of different news feeds), weather radar (images hard-coded to my location) and TV series information to let me know when my favorite shows are back on and have new episodes. These feeds are designed to feed various displays in the home, but are mainly keyed to my touchscreen interface.

(09-15-2010) House Touchscreen

I've mounted a touchscreen next to the main entry door to my home, and have been writing some software to give a house overview and media interface application for this screen. Currently it only displays the weather radar, but soon it will have a completed weather page and will have an option to view the radar screen for tracking storms. Also, I have used RSS feeds to gather the latest movie releases and news stories and these will be displayed in a scrolly at the bottom of the interface. I will update when the next version of the software is up and running.

(05-29-2010) SPRIME

This looks very cool! SPRIME

(05-06-2010) Chronos continues...

Last week, I worked on converting Chronos to a service (so no pictures of that...) and that went well. I continue to work on the application version, adding in new features all the time and then moving the completed and tested features into the service.

Currently, the application can respond to tweets with current weather and forecasts, using the zip code to identify location, also, it can communicate with other applications via TCP sockets, or get or post via HTTP request, or run an application. Also, I started making each of these actions into a separate thread, so the timer can run independently from the action calls.

Another new feature for the application was the ability to calculate sun rise, sun set and solar noon by using the longitude and latitude entered by the user. Currently, I don't trap events for sunset, sunrise or noon, but it's a simple addition. Next, I may add moon phases, but not sure if I have use for this feature.

So far, I'm very happy with my timer. For testing I set up a few events. It does a good job of reminding me to water my plants every night, as well as give me a quote of the day, as well as get any "tweets" sent to my home account and parse them and send back relevant data. Also, the twitter interface gives me the ability to create simple databases (CSV - comma delimited files) that I can import into various programs. So, when I fuel up my car, I can text a tweet to my home twitter account and my mileage and fuel is saved into a database for that vehicle. Very handy.

In the future I want to create a HTML/XML parser to deal with timed "gets" from HTTP/RSS/XML locations. So, for example, we can use this program to get a web page, parse out the needed information and send it on to the end user. Ideas for this include weather operations (like any warnings, watches or advisories that come along) or if a new episode of your favorite TV show is coming on tonight. I would like to create a simple, script based program, that can do this without reinventing the wheel every time a web page format is changed. I have an idea, but only time will tell if it works.