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Ben Halpern
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Do you have any home automation projects in the works?

Whether built, bought, or somewhere in between, what are the robots in your home doing these days?

Top comments (28)

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

I was hoping to get a general purpose home automation system so I tried investing in these things called "children", but they are proving to be a tricky technology. The learning time is extremely long, and the voice command system doesn't appear to work well. It's almost like they've developed their own thought processes and somehow consider me a servant. There's apparently no refund system either. I'm not sure it was a wise investment into home automation.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

😂

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🎲Danil Rodin🎲

Man! You did my day!😂

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Michael

This one really worked for me, broke them down into a technical language I can understand.

barnesandnoble.com/w/baby-owners-m...

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Shivam Kaushik

🤣🤣🤣

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Ankit Kumar

🤣

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I don't have anything on the go at the moment, but a couple of projects I did a while back:

I made a raspberry pi into an alexa-controlled pc turner-on-offer. Used the wemo API (there's a Python module for it) to respond to switch commands and made the pi send wake-on-lan to turn machines on and use an SSH command or RPC to shutdown Linux or
Windows respectively.

I made an IoT Teasmade. Tweets when tea is ready, makes tea etc. It's in bits at the moment.

The part of this that I liked the most is that I used the MW/VHF switch to choose between two playlists, one of 70s music and one of 80s music stations. When you turn the tuning knob (or issue the command from the API) it turns a salvaged mouse scroll wheel which can just be read from Python and basically does next or previous on the playlist. Every other track on the playlist is a 5-second recording of the tuning noises you used to get on radios when you were between stations so it sounds like someone is actually doing that.

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Pierre Bouillon

Would you mind sharing how do you trigger your tea-pot from your program? I'm trying to do kinda the same for my coffee machine and i'm looking for idea, thanks!

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Ben Sinclair

The whole tea cycle is triggered by a switch linked to the clock - literally a metal contact on the hour hand. It uses mains voltages for that which is a little insane. I bought a cheap 4-relay board off ebay (about £5) and wired it directly to that switch and the GPIO pins so I can trigger the tea-making cycle, the heater, or the light separately. Once the tea is made the power shuts off automatically, so I don't have to do anything clever

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ItsASine (Kayla) • Edited

Things in my apartment right now:

  • Hue lights in every personal light system (so lamps but not ceiling fixtures)
    • Turns itself on when boyfriend is getting ready for work and off by the time he should have left
    • Dims a half hour before bed, gradually turning off by the time its bedtime
  • Alexa with an Echo and Echo Dot (though boyfriend has a Google Home... I don't touch it)
    • Mostly used to check the weather or yell at it to turn on/off the Hue lights
    • It now can play Skyrim too
  • Logitech Bridge that barely works. It will turn on the TV but it is terribly finicky about my wifi. I need to fix it since it basically can automate anything with a remote.
  • Wemo Smart Plug that I used for Christmas lights
  • Withings (now Nokia) Smart Scale to sync my weight to The Cloud so various health apps can yell at me
  • IFTTT to tie everything together with the general internet (most useful right now is to get the scale to talk to Fitbit)
  • I have a firewall on its way to secure the whole set up, too
  • A Petcube and Amazon Cloud Cam to watch my cats while I'm at work. The Cloud Cam has a better app and quality but the Petcube, being actually designed for this, has a laser pointer to play with them. I still vote Cloud Cam, to be honest.

If I ever own a place, I'll deck out more and install fixtures like locks and stuff. But for now, I like this set up with my little apartment. Only things I'm tempted to improve are 1. a wifi Roomba since I hate cleaning 2. a wifi slow cooker so I can check on it while I'm at work and 3. an IoT router to play with.

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Gabriel Guzman

I've been setting up a "home dashboard" to collect a bunch of metrics that I expect to one day send to it! I also have a few temperature sensors sitting on my desk that I'm meaning to sprinkle around my apartment to see how temperature distribution works in my apartment. Otherwise, I have a few IoT connected lights that turn on and off automatically. Nothing out of the ordinary!

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Kat • Edited

My number one thing is to try to make my tassimo wireless. Why? Because I am lazy but the initial design has a couple of assumptions. That a cup is there and the coffee is in place.

I want to do it for fun mostly, no profit and the fact that I got the tassimo for free helps things.

It doesn't make things faster and it's mostly as a hobby project. Gains are in skills acquired I guess.

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Thomas H Jones II

Just lights. I started a few years ago with Lifx bulbs off the first post "sponsors" run of the product (I missed the Kickstarter by a couple months). Color production capabilities - especially compared HUE's is amazing. I've had them on schedules since the day I installed them. Finally added a Google Home last year when Google had them on fire sale. Sorta completed the picture since, now, I can interactively use the lights without having to tote my phone around to open the app.

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Mpho Mphego

A while back, I created a home automation project as part of my degree requirement and fortunately enough I documented most of my work.
Check it out goo.gl/yuYdRq

In short: it is a Smart Home Automation using Raspberry Pi and Arduino

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ComputerSmiths

I do a lot of temperature/humidity/power monitoring with Raspberry Pi and other linux boxes. Control is dicey, my big question is “ what is the fallback when it fails and I’m away? “. You would not belive the number of times I’ve gotten the “There’s no {Water, Power, Internet, etc}!!!” call from my wife. Just set the probability of something failing to 100% and see if it’s survivable. Monitoring good, control bad. 🙈 Cloud services will fail at random and when the company goes out of business, I know folks who can’t turn their lights on without a 15-year old X-10 master control box. 🤪

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Gunnar Gissel

I am way too suspicious of computers (especially networked) to trust running anything more critical in my home than a stereo to them

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Vincent Milum Jr

instagram.com/p/BrY1TEZhs_-/ <<< WiFi enabled Christmas tree. The controller is accessible over HTTP and animations are written in Lua, so easy updating without recompiling or uploading via a serial cable.