I am just getting started with Home Automation. I have been interested for quite some time (I had a roommate in graduate school with quite a bit of X10 and we had some simple stuff set up like slowly raising the lights as an alarm clock). However, now that I am done with graduate school and have a real job and a house I finally have the ability to pursue this. 
The catalyst for me was the big z-wave sale at Radio Shack (I picked up a bunch of dimmers; lamp, appliance, and outdoor modules; schlage IP cameras; a trane thermostats; and a deadbolt). Right now I'm controlling all this with a Vera 2.
Because I'm cheap (and my wife is starting to monitor my HA budget!) I don't want to be stuck with only z-wave, so I am trying x10 too. I grabbed a refurbished CM15A, a MS16a motion sensor, seven DS10A door/window sensors, and a TM751 transceiver and socket rocket. X10 certainly is cheap stuff, this was all about $35.
Finally, I have a pretty nice A/V setup that I would like to control. I have a pretty small house and only one TV (currently!). All of my A/V equipment is in a closet in my home office. I run HDMI from my Denon receiver and 5.1 surround through the attic to my living room. I use an IR bridge (x10 powermid) to control the equipment from the living room. Eventually I will add a 4x4 Monoprice HDMI matrix to drive TVs on other rooms, and also install a whole house audio system (on the cheap, maybe I'll put in some in ceiling speakers and just drive them off of my denon with a impedance match board?).
Yesterday I installed Ubuntu on an old dell and I set up lirc (I'm using a Manta TR1 MCE IR transceiver) and mochad (a new X10 driver for the cm15a). Surprisingly both were easy to set up. The Manta TR1 worked "out of the box" on ubuntu and is happily sending and receiving IR commands, and I can control my one X10 lamp and see the motion and security RF events. I installed misterhouse and decided that it wasn't quite what I wanted, although I think I can pull some great ideas from it so I am grateful to its developers.
Here is where I am right now:
1. I have my vera happily controlling all the z-wave.
2. I can control all my A/V equipment from IR
3. I can "listen" in to IR commands from remote control (e.g., to see if I hit 'pause' when watching a movie)
4. I can control my denon over ethernet
5. I can fully control my X10 equipment and see events over a TCP/IP socket
So it seems like I have a good start. I can control all my devices, I just need to work on the 'glue' that holds them together. I could use my vera to do all this with some Luup code. But that seems a little limiting.
My other thought was to use an event-driven programming framework (Perl's POE, Python Twisted, or Ruby's EventMachine). I figure I could get this set up pretty quickly, and once all the control code is working throw together a nice AJAX interface. Perhaps though, "O, that way madness lies".
I certainly don't want to recreate the wheel, and if there is any open source project doing what I am interested in I am happy to work on that instead. However, the existing stuff I've seen looks like it is a bit behind the times (misterhouse code base, which is understandable since its 15 years old), or too complicated (linuxmce). Otherwise, is anyone else messing with these frameworks and wants to collaborate?
Am I going about this completely wrong? I welcome *any* advice from HA gurus here, even if it is for me to go in a completely different direction!
-Rick (radengr)
The catalyst for me was the big z-wave sale at Radio Shack (I picked up a bunch of dimmers; lamp, appliance, and outdoor modules; schlage IP cameras; a trane thermostats; and a deadbolt). Right now I'm controlling all this with a Vera 2.
Because I'm cheap (and my wife is starting to monitor my HA budget!) I don't want to be stuck with only z-wave, so I am trying x10 too. I grabbed a refurbished CM15A, a MS16a motion sensor, seven DS10A door/window sensors, and a TM751 transceiver and socket rocket. X10 certainly is cheap stuff, this was all about $35.
Finally, I have a pretty nice A/V setup that I would like to control. I have a pretty small house and only one TV (currently!). All of my A/V equipment is in a closet in my home office. I run HDMI from my Denon receiver and 5.1 surround through the attic to my living room. I use an IR bridge (x10 powermid) to control the equipment from the living room. Eventually I will add a 4x4 Monoprice HDMI matrix to drive TVs on other rooms, and also install a whole house audio system (on the cheap, maybe I'll put in some in ceiling speakers and just drive them off of my denon with a impedance match board?).
Yesterday I installed Ubuntu on an old dell and I set up lirc (I'm using a Manta TR1 MCE IR transceiver) and mochad (a new X10 driver for the cm15a). Surprisingly both were easy to set up. The Manta TR1 worked "out of the box" on ubuntu and is happily sending and receiving IR commands, and I can control my one X10 lamp and see the motion and security RF events. I installed misterhouse and decided that it wasn't quite what I wanted, although I think I can pull some great ideas from it so I am grateful to its developers.
Here is where I am right now:
1. I have my vera happily controlling all the z-wave.
2. I can control all my A/V equipment from IR
3. I can "listen" in to IR commands from remote control (e.g., to see if I hit 'pause' when watching a movie)
4. I can control my denon over ethernet
5. I can fully control my X10 equipment and see events over a TCP/IP socket
So it seems like I have a good start. I can control all my devices, I just need to work on the 'glue' that holds them together. I could use my vera to do all this with some Luup code. But that seems a little limiting.
My other thought was to use an event-driven programming framework (Perl's POE, Python Twisted, or Ruby's EventMachine). I figure I could get this set up pretty quickly, and once all the control code is working throw together a nice AJAX interface. Perhaps though, "O, that way madness lies".
I certainly don't want to recreate the wheel, and if there is any open source project doing what I am interested in I am happy to work on that instead. However, the existing stuff I've seen looks like it is a bit behind the times (misterhouse code base, which is understandable since its 15 years old), or too complicated (linuxmce). Otherwise, is anyone else messing with these frameworks and wants to collaborate?
Am I going about this completely wrong? I welcome *any* advice from HA gurus here, even if it is for me to go in a completely different direction!
-Rick (radengr)
