new technologies, new ideas, a new kind of home
Paul Taylor from The Smarter Home Club discusses the home automation setup he installed for his parents, in order to help his father more effectively handle some significant mobility challenges.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Home Accessibility systems for the Differently Abled”
When you get started on your home automation journey, it is REALLY easy to go down a rabbit-hole. If you’re not careful and disciplined, you can end up making a lot of extra work for yourself that could be avoided with good planning. That’s in addition to the extra work you can cause by changing technologies in the middle of your project!
Today, I decided to put up my Ring Floodlight Cameras. I am combining these with an already installed Ring Doorbell Pro. Much like the doorbell, installing these was more of a challenge than it should have been….
Continue reading “Ring Floodlight Cameras, or “It ain’t always easy…””
Kerry Clendinning of the Smarter Home Club explains how IR works and offers advice on how to get better performance!
Paul Taylor from the Smarter Home Club returns for part three of his series on the Raspbee/Conbee. In this part, he covers connecting a device to the Zigbee network!
In the last entry, I introduced MQTT, as it is an important messaging protocol for use in home automation and IoT. It will be one of the primary tools in our project illustrating how to connect some unusual technologies into a more standard home automation system. One other component we need to introduce is Webhooks.
Continue reading “About Webhooks….”
I need to make a brief detour on our project to integrate X10 sensors into a larger home automation system. Normally, I try to avoid any side trips that may end up taking me down a rabbit hole, but I need to cover the communication method that I plan to use to connect the disparate components of the system together – MQTT.
In this second installment on X10, I want to show you how easy it is to send signals on the CM15a. In PART I, I showed you how to use the SDK to log messages (build a viewer, basically), so the logical next step is to have the ability to send instructions to switches, plugs, and outlets, right?
Continue reading “Integrating X10 into your Home Automation System II”
Our buddy Paul Taylor is back with Part 2 of his series teaching us about Raspbee/Conbee for home automation!
Continue reading “Phoscon ZigBee Gateway AKA – ConBee or RaspBee – Part 2: Installation”
I always imagine that my cat pulls out a straight razor and glares at me with hate in her heart whenever I say that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Just the same, that’s something that I say a lot when I’m working on a home automation project.
Continue reading “Troubleshooting The Ring Doorbell Pro Install”