Here’s a round up of just some of the home automation projects, kits and more found on MAKE! If you do home automation, post what you’ve made, used or bought in the comments!
You could make your own “proximity based power system”…
Make – Volume 08 – Smart HVAC (Page 140).
MIDAS: Homemade Dorm Room Home Automation System.
Home automation with the Basic Stamp.
Use old pda as interface for home automation.
Homebrew Home Automation Project.
Rackbox – Extreme home automation.
Wireless Webcam For Homebrew Automation/Security Project.
Home Automation hacks (Wiki). A couple cool hacks here – X10RfConfiguration – essentially converts the fairly unreliable powerline X10 to a more reliable (under many circumstances) RF X10 at virtually no cost and homebrew X10 signal analyzer – rather than measure signal strength, this homebrew signal analyzer (built with a lego mindstorms RCX) actually counts the transmissions that arrive at the destination X10 sensor, for comparison to the source sensor. Missing transmissions indicate reliability problems.
The Open Source Gift Guide: Open source hardware … Here’s some great opensource DIY Home automation software, written in Perl with a Web interface. For windows or Linux/unix. It also works with the One Wire Weather station posted a few days ago.” MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It’s fun, it’s free, and it’s entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. $ Just need to buy/eBay the home automation hardware, like x10 (easily found for cheap).
Smarthome’s INSTEONNetLinc devices (works with iPhone).
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