Home Control Ideas

I've got to thinking about home control again. Home control with sensors should be a breeze in the 21st century, unfortunately its not - and its expensive. For now I think home control will still be in the realm of the hobbyist, but we should try to make it easier in increments.

X-10 is a great starter home control system. X-10 is safer than wiring up your own relay boards, and extends the range of your control. Its disadvantages are its slowness and its reliability, there are sites that say that X-10 signals have trouble sometimes getting to their destinations. That being said it should not discourage you to try out this protocol, because you can get most of what you want done with this protocol. It's the 80-20 solution to home control.

I think X-10 can be greatly augmented with Arduino, python, and google. Motion detection to turn on the lights in an area, to turn on fans if a room gets to hot, or just turn on the coffee maker using your TV remote control are all possible. You can send data to a website on google, or download behavior instruction from your site to show how your home should act when your away.

I'm going to use one of my arduino protoboards to connect to a X-10 module and see if I can control my lights from my computer, after that I'll try to control of a fan based off the temperature of the room. After getting the prototype completed, I'll set up a pcb and make a few for the whole of my house.