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Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#31

Post by allwein »

shrughes wrote: post #3

I hacked my lights and some power outlets. I can turn them on by flipping a simple switch. I also hacked a lock onto my door and hacked some layers of paint on the ceiling. Then I paid some people to install a temperature control hack so that air conditioning can be controlled based on a heat sensor. And some other people came in and hacked some wires to different ports near the floor. They put a box in the alcove wh…

Just to point out that each of these things were ingenious hacks at the time they were invented.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#32

Post by lemming »

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…

I take my hat off to you, sir.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#35

Post by qjz »

lotharbot wrote: post #19
kingsidharth wrote: post #18

Does managing to keep your mum outta your room for a month counts? It's a big deal, I tell you. Especially if you are a messy teens. Tricks like make it smell with your shoes work well.

As a teen, I did quite a bit of work to keep my family out of my room. I come from a very large family, and I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there (defeating the purpose of my clean, quiet space.) I arranged the furniture such that anyone entering the room would have to walk through a narrow space between a dresser a…

"I'd managed to turn my room into the cleanest and quietest place in the house, which meant everyone else wanted to spend a lot of time there"

How true! My home office was also my workshop/server room. I got tired of the heat, noise and technorubble, so I gave away the desk, moved the servers to the (much cooler) basement, and stripped the whole room down to just a sofa and mostly empty bookshelf. Now it's in high demand, and I only use it when I'm home alone. But at the same time, I got rid of all our towers and switched everyone to wireless laptops, so it's not too hard to find a quiet corner anywhere else in the house to work.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#36

Post by Vivtek »

shrughes wrote: post #3

I hacked my lights and some power outlets. I can turn them on by flipping a simple switch. I also hacked a lock onto my door and hacked some layers of paint on the ceiling. Then I paid some people to install a temperature control hack so that air conditioning can be controlled based on a heat sensor. And some other people came in and hacked some wires to different ports near the floor. They put a box in the alcove wh…

Dammit, I declined to make this joke because it was off-topic.

I hack masonry and plaster! Much more steampunk (and thus maker-like) than mere paint and wiring.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#37

Post by Vivtek »

crocowhile wrote: post #21

I had X10 all over the place when I was living in the US. It's quite cheap and not too bad of an investment, especially if you are just renting the place. Now I am back in Europe and I left all that equipment behind in Wisconsin? Is anybody interested? I was planning to sell it on craigslist but maybe a fellow HNer will have a better use.

Totally interested, yes. My email is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#39

Post by anonymousDan »

whyleyc wrote: post #27

You should check out Andy Stanford Clark from IBM - afaik he uses MQ technologies hooked up to various sensors to control and monitor much of his 16th century house on the Isle of Wight (UK)- http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/things_that_tw...

+1, I went to to a talk by him a few years ago and from memory some of the quirkier things he had hooked up were automated mousetrap notifcations and an ambient orb that lets you know how much energy your house is using.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone hacked their homes?

#40

Post by jsdalton »

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.

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