I've been looking into the possibilities of setting up some home automation and sensing stuff on my home network, logging the outputs to PC. A friend of mine @markphelan uses a 1-wire based network to monitor temperatures and other bits and bobs so I thought I'd give it an investigate to see what it entails.
So far i've gathered that its hideously complicated and I probably need to do some more reading before I reach for the credit card and start ordering stuff.
Requirements so far:
- Temperature sensing for tropical aquarium, office, lounge and bedroom.
- Integration with my parallel port relay (software yet to be written - I know i'm rubbish!) so that I can switch the lights on/off for both fish tanks.
All off the above can be nicely monitored using my already written monitoring application which I've got "tweeting" status updates to on @OliClarkeHome. I will eventually get round to opensourcing it but it needs some tidying up and I need to write some code to pull the configuration from an XML file instead of my (hacked) hard coded constants! (bad bad bad!).
The geek in me has been loving the following websites:
UK Rocket Man has loads of stuff on home automation using 1-wire networks and X-10 to control "stuff" (he's also well into his rockets and there is a load odf stuff on there too).
And now I've seen this site I want to build my own 19" rack!
Finally, for all those Geeks out there take a look at this reflection on the Apollo Guidance Computer and how much computing power it had. (If you're feeling particularly nerdy you could even build your own.
