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Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#51

Post by nodata »

cellucci wrote: post #29
nodata wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is X10 a joke?

Depending on how noisy your house's electrical system is, the commands and responses between controllers and devices can be lost. I control my sprinkler system with X10 from a Linux box and my first iteration flooded my back yard when I was on vacation a couple of years ago when a power-off command wasn't received.

So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#52

Post by cellucci »

nodata wrote: post #51
cellucci wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how noisy your house's electrical system is, the commands and responses between controllers and devices can be lost. I control my sprinkler system with X10 from a Linux box and my first iteration flooded my back yard when I was on vacation a couple of years ago when a power-off command wasn't received.

So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?

For feedback it depends on the device. Cheap light switches, for example, might just have on and off commands. Better versions will have a status command as well, and maybe a multi-level dim, etc. In my case the sprinkler switch did have status capability, but my cheesy little shell script was just assuming the commands succeeded.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#53

Post by ethank »

I just bought a house (chronicled it at http://blackrimglasses.com). My last townhouse was also automated. Here's the general setup:

We use Insteon for the automation system, hooked into a MacMini running Indigo from Perceptive Automation.

I have the system setup so it has "states" that the house is in, ie: home, baby in bed, etc. The "actions" you can do are contingent on conditions. So if my wife and I are closing up the house, but the baby is asleep, it will keep the light near his room from going on.

For whole home audio we have a Sonos, with five zones, including our patio. The Mac Mini system serves the audio. It also has AirVideo transcoding on it for our iPads. We use iphones and ipads to control everything (two of each).

When we bought the house, we put Cat-6 in every room, so most everything runs off hard line Ethernet. We have three dual band Airport Extreme's in the house for wireless.

The thermostat and sprinklers run off the insteon device and are controlled by the MacMini. Our stereo (Denon 3808CI) has a web and socket interface, so that is controlled remotely fairly often.

Our DirectTV's have the "whole home DVR" thing, which uses a MOCA coax adapter on each box to create its own network. We have two DVR's and two regular recievers.

I haven't yet done cameras and such, or motion detectors but we plan on it. Currently for occupancy sensing, I use a hack to get the locations of our iPhones from MobileMe.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#55

Post by gduffy »

jsdalton wrote: post #40
gduffy wrote: post #26

My weekend hacking on IP cameras turned into a startup: Dropcam ( http://www.dropcam.com ). Dropcams can push alert your iPhone on motion or sound and they store up to 30 days of video. When I was a kid, I had the Firecracker serial-to-wireless-to-X10 gadget hooked up to a PC running Microsoft Agent/batch scripts. I could voice control my ceiling fan, lights, etc like Star Trek (at least, if the Enterprise had ceilin…

Wow, I'm so going to buy this. We've got another baby on the way and I was looking for something like this to use as a baby monitor. Nothing out there has really caught my fancy yet, but this looks pretty darn awesome. BTW, I might not represent your potential customer base perfectly, but I would ideally like to see a few more screenshots of the web interface on your website.

Congratulations! We hear a lot of fun stuff from our baby monitoring customers. One of our users called it "Baby TiVo" ... you can export clips to send to the family, so it's lots of fun.

As for screenshots, did you check out http://www.dropcam.com/demo? You get there by clicking "See it live" on the homepage. We should probably add links to it from the learn more/product pages.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#56

Post by sokoloff »

How much time do you have? :)

Great resources:

http://www.cocoontech.com (forum dedicated to exactly your question)

http://www.charmedquark.com (the software package I chose to buy, though there are many others)

There's also some coverage on AVScience, but cocoontech has largely taken over, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#57

Post by jawngee »

nodata wrote: post #51
cellucci wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how noisy your house's electrical system is, the commands and responses between controllers and devices can be lost. I control my sprinkler system with X10 from a Linux box and my first iteration flooded my back yard when I was on vacation a couple of years ago when a power-off command wasn't received.

So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?

Also, X10 is noticeably slower than Z-Wave.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#58

Post by gabelerner »

abollaert wrote: post #28

I used a combination of Arduino boards (Atmega controllers), Velleman dimmers and a Velleman relay board to control all the lights in my home, with pushbutton switches that have feedback LEDs. Then I wrote an application on top of that (running off an AT91SAM9 dev board) that implements mood combinations, also exposing a protocolbuffers/http based API (events are IP multicast) that I use to control everything with my…

what brand of pushbutton switches with feedback LEDs did you use?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#59

Post by abollaert »

gabelerner wrote: post #58
abollaert wrote: post #28

I used a combination of Arduino boards (Atmega controllers), Velleman dimmers and a Velleman relay board to control all the lights in my home, with pushbutton switches that have feedback LEDs. Then I wrote an application on top of that (running off an AT91SAM9 dev board) that implements mood combinations, also exposing a protocolbuffers/http based API (events are IP multicast) that I use to control everything with my…

what brand of pushbutton switches with feedback LEDs did you use?

I used switches from CJC systems (a small Belgian company, a friend of mine designs prints for them, so I was able to get my hands on a few of them for the sake of my "experiment").

http://www.cjcsystems.com/index.php?page=Products&catid=...

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#60

Post by gabelerner »

abollaert wrote: post #59
gabelerner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what brand of pushbutton switches with feedback LEDs did you use?

I used switches from CJC systems (a small Belgian company, a friend of mine designs prints for them, so I was able to get my hands on a few of them for the sake of my "experiment"). http://www.cjcsystems.com/index.php?page=Products&catid=...

cool thanks!
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