My name is Bruce Mamjan. I live in Philadelphia. Glad to be here. I've been attending FOSSTEM
since 2003. This is my first time in a huge room, so I guess I'm going up in the world.
This presentation is actually part of a 20-year journey for me using home automation. Not a
whole lot of 20-year home automation folks out there, but I'm one of them. What this talk is
going to be is walking you through that journey and giving you a lot of practical experience of
what I've learned. Hopefully, leaving here, you'll have a better idea of not only what home
automation things you can do, but also what home automation things are worth doing. That's a
distinction. What you can do and what you should do are not always the same. I will give you some
examples of that. If you're interested in my slides, they are right here on this website,
in addition to this QR code right here. I am a Postgres core team member, so that's where
you actually will also find 58 other Postgres talks and a lot of other Postgres things,
but this has nothing to do with Postgres. Feel relaxed. I expect this to be an interesting
talk. I will take questions as I go about specific topics, and then I'll leave time at the end for
general topics, if that's okay. I'll just walk through. I'll ask for specific questions on a
specific thing, and then at the end, we'll have time. What are we going to talk about?
First, we'll talk about what is computerized automation. I know that might sound trivial to
you, but I'm going to explain what automation is, and then what computerized automation is
slightly different. We're then going to evaluate some technologies. I'm actually using, because
I've been using automation for so long, my automation goes back to the 1980s. Yes, amazing.
They had automation back then. Why are we not all flying around in cars, right, and have robot
helpers? I don't know, but again, this technology has been around for a long time. I will talk a
little bit about some of the evolving technologies. We even had some new technology in the past six
months. It's a very hot field now when I was doing it, not so much. We'll talk about a sample
deployment, basically how I went at the problem. Again, I'm going to be using old technology,
but it's going to be the same process that you're going to go through. You have to sometimes
avoid being overwhelmed by having too many options, and I'll try and explain how to hone
in on that. I'll also explain what happens if you overdo automation, because nobody really
talks about that. Everything sounds wonderful, but not always true. I'm going to talk about
some of the programming issues I have, and then toward the end, we're going to talk about what
is success? What does home automation success look like? Again, just because you can do something
and it works doesn't mean it's actually benefiting your life, and that's what I'm going to try and
cover. Finally, I'll talk about a couple applications that I've been challenged with,
and then obviously some solutions to that. Let's talk about automation. What is
non-programmatic automation? This is the concept of you've automated something,
but it doesn't necessarily have computer control. It's not something that you can
programmatically adjust and basically control. Things like, I don't know how many of you
are old enough to remember that years ago you used to have timers, that you'd plug into lamps,
and you'd have a dial. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you still have them. That's good. Although these
older people who are raising their hand, oh, there's just one younger person there,
but they'd have a dial, and you'd turn it, and you'd set the time, and then every time you lost
power, you had to go back and set the dial to the right time. That is not programmatic automation.
How many people have heard of something called the clapper? Oh my goodness. Yeah, if you want a
hal, take a look at an old commercial video. It basically was a lamp that you would clap your
hands, and it would turn on, and then you'd clap your hands, and it would turn off, hence
the name clapper. Dawn dust sensors, you see those, of course, everywhere where when it gets
dark, the lights go on. When it gets light, the lights go on. It's not programmatic, but it works
really well. And of course, motion sensors, and those have gotten much more sophisticated over time,
but again, years ago, they had even the idea of motion sensors, somebody would get close
to the garage or walking to an entryway, and the light would go on, very convenient. Not
programmatic, but very convenient. But then we're going to talk about programmatic automation,
and this has really sort of exploded in the past, I don't know, five years, I'd say.
For example, the concept of voice automation, voice control, is something that obviously
didn't really didn't exist effectively 20 years ago, and now it's sort of hugely popular. But
the interesting thing about programmatic automation is that it allows you to take,
you see, the non-programmatic automation, the automation was kind of built into the device,
right? You had the clapper, or you had a motion sensor, or you had a dawn dusk sensor,
and you couldn't really change it. It was wired into how the device behaved, and you couldn't
combine that with some other device, or combine it with some other inputs and make something
different happen. Not that it wasn't useful, but programmatic allows you to combine behavior.
It also allows you to do distance things. So again, one of the examples would be somebody
comes into the garage, the garage doors open, and some other action happens somewhere else
in the house, right? Not usually something that would happen in a non-programmatic way,
but it's easy to do if you're on a network of some type, right? Activity detection,
being able to write scripts and basically programs that control with the automation,
incredibly powerful. And then finally, and I'll talk about this a little later, the idea of even
bringing in external data and having the external data affect your home automation. For example,
how cold is it outside, right? You may not have a thermometer or a home automation thermometer
outside of your house, but you may be able to go to the weather service and find out how cold it
is, and change your automation based on that. Again, this is where I think it gets really
interesting, and you're going to see a lot of examples of that. Okay. Any questions so far?
Okay. All right. Now, evaluating your technology. Now, I'm going way, way back in history here, but
basically what is a network? What is the ability to communicate distances? Well, one of the early
networks I didn't even list here is the telegraph. Now, I was a history major, so I studied the
impact of the telegraph on society, and it was pretty dramatic, right? Something could happen
in New York City, and within several minutes, people in Europe or people on the West Coast
would know about it right away, right? I mean, that's pretty impressive. The telephone, of course,
is a network. I guess you still do. You used to dial a number, right? It used to make sparks in
the phone. That doesn't happen anymore, but you dial a number, and somewhere some distant person
answers, right? Cordless telephones. I was around long enough to remember when those came out.
All of a sudden, you didn't have to have the receiver connected with a wire anymore. It's a
sort of network, right? Then we had ethernet, which obviously has been around since I remember
the late 90s. Before that, it was like token ring and a bunch of weird stuff on coax. Well,
you can still do ethernet on coax, but you get the idea. Wireless networks. I remember when those
came out, so all of a sudden now, I didn't have to be tethered with a wire ethernet. I could do it
wirelessly. This fourth one here, electrical, the fifth one, electrical network. I'm going to show
you how that's actually a network. You might not have thought of that, but it is, and I'll show you
why. And then finally, we're going to talk about some new wireless networks that are available,
all right? So, looking historically, kind of a very 10,000 foot view of what's going on,
the technology you're going to see me using from the 80s is something called X10. And I'll show
you how it works. I'll show you some wiring diagrams. I was kind of impressed over here. I got a nice
little, you know, like electrical little sticker here. I was like, oh, it's an electrical panel.
Like very exciting. We're going to show you a little bit of that. There's something called U,
universal power bus, which I don't think, I don't think it's even around anymore, but it was an
early way of doing the same thing. And then we have things like Z-Wave and ZigBee. They are
somewhat confusing because they both begin with Z. But ZigBee is the one you normally see. It is
an international standard. Z-Wave is a proprietary interface that you don't see around a lot, a
whole lot anymore. There used to be something called Instion, which I think is still around, but
again, it's, you don't see it pretty much anymore. I wanted to talk a little bit about a brand new
standard that just came out in the fall of last year, so maybe six, four or six months ago,
called Matter. How many people have heard of Matter? Wow. Okay. That's great. Okay. So
Matter is basically not, I want to qualify what that is. It's not really a network. It's really
a protocol for devices using different networks to communicate, right? So up until now, for example,
if you had a ZigBee Phillips Hue light bulb, let's say, you had to communicate with it using a
Phillips app or a Phillips hub. And the idea of Matter is that we're going, is it's going to allow
for home automation using different protocols. So could be ZigBee, I believe it's for its X10.
It could be something like, something like Thread, which is kind of a lousy name, frankly,
because it's confusing. So many things with threads. But it's a new protocol for low-power
devices, which is, which you have a lot of those things now. So if you want to kind of get a
lowdown on that, I've got a great article here. I also have some websites down here. So anything
in blue is basically something you can click on. If you download the PDF, you just click on the blue
and it pulls up the site for you. So again, a lot of opportunities, you know, it's sort of thinking back.
You know, when X10 came out in the 80s, there was a sense that, oh, home automation is now here.
We're going to be able to do all this stuff. And, you know, 35 years went by and really nothing
happened. I was like the only guy, the person doing it. And eventually, you know, eventually now you
hear a lot more about it and there's a lot more excitement about it, partially because the technology
is advanced, partially because there's more options, partially because more people are doing things
electronically or they're used to that interface and people are getting used to it. But there's
still some limitations and I'll kind of talk about that. You know, not only do I do home
automation, but I think I've inspired my family. My son does home automation. He's a big home kit
person, a home kit being the Apple-like home automation thingy. I have a brother who does it.
Most of his stuff is Zigbee. And I have a nephew who does it who also uses a lot of Zigbee stuff.
So I have some interesting stories about that. Some good, some bad or problems that they had.
But I'll talk about that when I kind of get a little farther ahead. Okay.
Choosing a network. So let's suppose you're going to use some network technology or you're going
to use some kind of home automation. One of the first things you have to figure out is what do I
want to measure? And what do I want to control? Because effectively, all of the home automation
is really like an input output kind of a case, right? When this happens, this other thing's
supposed to happen. Or when I see this activity, I want some other activity to happen. Okay. So you
have to identify if you're going to choose a particular technology. Is it a multi-protocol
technology? Does it something like matter that can operate with multiple things? Or is it more
like a Phillips hub that only really controls like Phillips devices, right? So you kind of see
the difference. There's hubs that do only one protocol. There's some hubs that do multiple
protocols. And if you pick a technology and that technology doesn't have a sensor you need,
or doesn't have a controller you need, what are you going to do? Like for example, I needed 220
volt control of my pool pump. Now, some of these protocols don't have just, they just don't have
220 options, 220 volt options. Now, I'm sorry, I'm living in the United States. So remember,
everything's 110, you have 220, everything here. So everything's, everything's fantastic in Europe,
right? But we got both. So in my case, that was somewhat of a challenge, right? What about,
what about a thermostat? If you need to control a thermostat or HVAC system, does that have an
interface? What if, what if you want to, what if you want to open the garage, right? I'm going to
show you later how I figured out how to figure out if the garage opens or shuts that I can figure
out. But what about how, open it yourself? Like what's the control? Does your, is your protocol
support controlling garage doors, right? Chimes, that's one that's actually pretty limited. There's
a lot, some of the interface, a lot of the interface don't have chimes. You may not think
that's important. I use it a lot. Wireless remotes, like the ability to have a wireless control
for your device. What about a phone? Does it have a phone app or a phone interface, right?
And of course, most of them have electrical plug controls. That's pretty clear.
So again, you have to, and then there's different open source products. I'm actually using this
thing called Hey You. Mr. House is very popular for home automation. There's a whole lot of
open source home automation stuff. It's pretty cool. But my point is that you, you can't just
jump in and say, I like the name Zigbee, or I like the name Matter, or I like, I like, I like the
hue light bulbs from Phillips. You got to make sure that you're going to be able to bridge
your sensors and your activity together under a unified system. Does that make sense to people?
Is that, that kind of makes sense? I guess I've noticed it because I would say, oh, I really
want to do X. Oh, I don't have a way of doing that, or I really want to know X, or I don't have a
way of finding that out. And that was kind of cool. Now, signal reliability, you see that a lot,
some with, with, with different, like Zigbee, I know has a limitation of distance, because it's
a wireless protocol. So again, it might use Wi Fi. Do you have Wi Fi in all parts of your home,
right? That they're all reachable. Is it reliable? If you're using something like X 10,
do you have a way of doing that? I'll show you how that actually works. What about this kind of,
seems kind of unusual, simplicity of device replacement. Why did I bring that one up?
I had a friend, I knew a friend who, when he brought a, bought a new house, he put automated
outlets in all, all of his outlets were automated. So instead of the normal plug, you know, like the
normal outlet, every outlet was home automation enabled. And you're thinking, wow, guys are genius.
This is great. He's going to be able to control. This is probably 10 years ago. And he said, you
know, it was kind of neat, but the reliability of the devices wasn't very good. And it feels like
every one month, let's say one Saturday a month, I am replacing an outlet in my house. And I'm like,
that does not sound like fun because again, outlets, normal outlets will last for 30 or 40
years, right? Is a home automation outlet going to last 30 or 40 years? And even if it does,
are you still going to be using that protocol 30 or 40 years from now? Right? That's, I mean,
think about how much it's changed even in the past five years. It's hard to imagine, right?
What, what, what, what opportunities or what interface you're going to need 10 years from
now. You really want to replace all the outlets in your house with a new, with either replace it as
they break or replace them. My brother had the ZigBee thing and he, the electricity like bounced on
his house and all of a sudden all his devices went offline. And we're at a dinner. I think we had,
it was me and my cousins and my brother were having a dinner and he's talking about this thing. And
it just happened. And he hasn't been home yet because he went to work and happened while he was
at work. So his wife calls, now the whites work. I can't turn on anything. He says, well unplug
this. Unplug that, plug that back in. Doesn't fix it. And he's asking me, could a power spike,
when they take the electricity off and on, could it have wiped out like a third of his devices?
Because a third of his device would just like, gone. And I said, it's possible, but it's more
likely it's the, like a hub or something. And it turned out he gave me the report later. He said,
I went home and I played with it for like four or five hours and I got it working again. So
hey, he had to be home to do it. His wife was not able to do it because she'd understand the
network and how it was set up. But even then I think what he ended up having to do was to hard
reset one of the hubs and that brought all the devices back on. Power cycling, it didn't work.
It seems like some part of the CMOS got, whatever, the firmware got weird. But again, is that something
you want to deal with in your house? And is that what you're, is that something your family wants
to deal with in your house, right? So I'm just, I'm just saying, I'm not saying it's right or wrong,
but it's, it's a reality is what I'm saying. Cost can be an issue. I know the Insteon stuff was
fairly expensive. I have heard complaints about the cost of some of the Phillips products, although
the quality is very high. People have talked about that. So again, a lot of things go into that
choice, longevity, ability to upgrade, that kind of thing. Very, very interesting. I don't have
any answers, but very interesting. Any questions so far? Okay. All right. Let me just dive in
because this is a software conference. I want to give you, you know, some geeky stuff here.
And this, this kind of freaked me out that this actually works. But it works every day
without fail to the point where my family has no idea it doesn't, it could never not work. So about
20 years ago, I had, I just moved into a big house. And, you know, we're kind of living in
the house for six months. Electrician was there. He was working on something. I remember was there.
I remember why I was there. He was a really nice guy. And I said, you know, I said,
can you, can you look at something? My wife would, there's a, there's a light at the bottom of the
stairs. And my wife would like a switch at the top of the stairs. You can turn the light on,
right? You're going down the stairs at night. You want to be able to turn the light on, but as
you're walking down the stairs, make perfect sense. So I asked the guy, I said, can we, can you put a
switch here? He's like, he's like, well, he said, I can, but the problem is the lights downstairs,
the switch is on the wall downstairs. So I'd have to like open the wall and then the ceiling
to get the wire up to the wall on the second floor, right? To put the switch in. I'm like,
well, I don't, I don't think we want it that much. I don't think it's that important. He said, as
that, have you, have you thought about X 10? I'm like, I said, I've heard of it. I said, does it
really work? And he said, he said, actually it does. He said, I put it in my house and it actually
works really well. But he said also, he said, I've talked to my customers about it. And particularly
when I'm doing new construction, and I can basically install it while I'm working on their stuff. And
and he said, every person I've talked to, I give them the quote of the price, it's like $600 to add
some home automations, maybe the lights outside or whatever. But every customer I've talked to
has said no. So he said, I use it. But everyone I try and recommend it to, they like, oh, I don't
want the headache. I don't want to pay the $600. I don't see the value. These are the kind of things
that the feedback that he has an electrician got. All right. So let me show you how it works.
And we can kind of like walk through it and sort of see. Okay, so this is, and I apologize if
there's any US specific electrical things in here. I'm going to do my best. Okay, so this is, this
is basically the sign way for electricity. I believe this is a US cycle here, because I think
it's 60 Hertz. And in the in Europe, it would be it would be 50 Hertz, right? So you just just pretend
it's it's not that. So it basically the electricity goes up and down like this. This is alternating
current. Okay, pretty, pretty straightforward. This is positive volt. This is negative volt. Okay.
And then and then the target is 115 roughly in the US and it just goes back and forth. Okay.
What they figured out in the 80s is that when the electricity crosses the zero voltage point,
they could inject a small signal like a blip at a certain frequency and have it travel along
the entire wiring of your house. Okay, so I'm not sure how many of you are aware that for example,
you can run ethernet over coax now, it's called mocha. And it's basically if you have coax in your
house, you can run ethernet. So I have a I have a TV in the family room, I don't have ethernet out
there. But I have a coax. So in the basement, I have a mocha adapter, ethernet plugs in,
out comes the coax, the coax goes through the whole house, gets picked up in the family room,
I have another mocha adapter, in comes coax, out comes ethernet, goes right into the TV.
Okay, so the same way that you can run ethernet over coax, you can run home automation over an
electrical system. Okay, crazy, but true. So here we have, here we have a signal blip right here.
Okay, here's a zero. So this would be a one. Yeah, we're getting back to binary here, very exciting.
People are salivating. So here's a zero, here's a one, right, here's a zero, here's a zero, here's
a one, here's a zero. Okay. And if you think of, now we're now we're starting to see where we're
going here, you can see this is 110, 011, 01001. Okay, so what they effectively did, these people
in the 80s weren't idiots, they basically had a binary code for different house codes, it goes
from A to P. So this is the binary code for A. I know it's not ASCII, it's just whatever it is.
They did have ASCII back then, but you know, stick with me here. This is A, this is B, this is C,
this is D. And these are the patterns for the different house codes. So if you want, so actually
here's a, here's a sine wave on what device is this, A1. Oh, right, people know what that's called,
that's good, a oscilloscope, yes. I'm not that old, I guess, people remember, yes, this is an
oscilloscope right here. And you can see that's the way it used to look, and it was, tectronics
was the big manufacturer of these, as I remember. And here is an oscilloscope showing those little
blips in the crossing of the zero voltage. Okay, so that's literally, and we can thank, I believe,
I have a website that lists where I got this from, but that's kind of cool that you can just kind of
link like that. Okay, so that's two ones right there. Okay, so the X10 standard basically,
I actually forget the 1980s, 1975, was the standard was made in Scotland. It didn't really become
popular, I think, till the 80s, uses the 120 Hertz carrier. And again, that's 260 kHz cycles in the
US. I believe they also have them in Europe for European things. So one bit is transmitted
per zero crossing, 120 bits a second, there you go. You thought modems were bad, this one's really bad.
256 maximum devices on your network, 16 house codes, each house code has 16 devices. And again,
there's the standard right there. Okay, so this is what it would look like, the protocol for that.
This would be the start code. This is the house code. And this is the device number. And then you
would say on or off or dim or whatever you want that device to do. This is how you control it.
This is the full protocol. So here are our house codes. Here are device numbers up to 16. And here
are commands. So it looks like there's about 16 commands. There's, let's see, brightness,
dimness, on or off. These are the big ones right here. These four. These four are the ones you see the most.
Crazy but really cool that they got this to work.
Obviously one of the problems is you need like three quarter of a second to send a signal.
And those of you who are really smart will realize that's kind of slow. It's because you always send
the signal twice because electrical systems can be noisy. And therefore, if the same signal appears
twice, then you know that that's the valid signal. Okay, so it's sent twice, poor propagation. The
United States uses split phase systems. I'll talk about that in a minute. I don't think Europe has
that problem, but that there's an issue there. Line noise can be a problem. And other buildings can
also probably see be a problem. So this is what a house typically looks like. You've got a 220
coming in, but basically it's positive 110 and negative 110. And then you have two phases. You
have a positive phase and then a negative phase over here. And that's typically the way that houses
are in the United States at least are built. One of the problems, of course, is that because you
have split phase, it's hard to get signal from one side of the phase to the other. So they have
something called a signal coupler, which basically transmits that blip between the two. Okay.
Phase coupling is just do that. You can filter stuff, so you can filter out line noise if you
want. So let's look at the actual devices. This is a switch right here. This is a normal switch.
This is an X 10 switch. Notice there's no up or down because, you know, it's just a button because
you may have turned it on remotely, right? So we don't have a status to it. There's no physical
status. You push it. So on you push it, it's off. Okay. You might be thinking, oh, gee, why would
I want a button like when I have home automation? And the funniest story I can tell you is that if
home automation had started first and we never had physical buttons and physical buttons showed up,
people would think they were genius because because there's physical buttons are really convenient.
Okay. Let me tell you, let me tell you how convenient they are. My nephew lives in New York City,
rehab the whole house, decided he was going to go full with home automation, put in physical light
switches, but he decided I'm not going to use them. I'm just going to use the Philips or the
Z-Way Zigbee bulbs. So if you're going to use the Zigbee bulbs and you control them remotely,
you effectively have to always give them power, right? So the switch, you got to leave it on all
the time. If you turn it off, it can't turn on anymore and flipping a switch doesn't work. It
doesn't do anything. So what he decided he was going to do is every time he was going to control it
with voice controls, so when he walks in the room, he says echo lights on and he leaves, he says
echo lights off and echo lights on and echo lights off. And I was there in the fall and I said,
how's it going? He said, you know, we're getting tired of talking all the time.
And he said, you know, I thought it was really cool, but after a while it gets kind of annoying.
So I think he's going to have to rethink that whole home automation lack of switch control thing.
So there's what, the physical switch. Just what I'm saying is don't dismiss the light switches
as completely useless. There actually is some use to that. Here's a different type of switch.
It's a flat switch, you know, but more modern basically. Three-way switches, you can do those
with X10 as well. So that's actually a three-way switch right there. No, actually, this is three-way,
we're all three-way switches, actually, these three. You can do this, which is kind of cool.
It's basically, there's nothing behind this. This is just stuck on the wall, right? So it's
basically a wireless remote. You just hit the button, you stick it. This is how I fix the
problem coming down the stairs. I just stuck one of these on the wall and then, you know, every two
years I replace the little battery that's in it, like this big. So I go around the whole house,
just replace all the batteries, every two years, it works really well. This is the adapter that
basically receives the signal from the wireless, if you have that, okay? This is another wireless
device that we have, little buttons, whatever you want, you control it. This is a four-device
model. There's also a 16-device model right here. So this one right here, and this is a lamp.
And you can see, here's a good setup. Here's the lamp. Here's the X10 module plugged into the
outlet, okay? And then, basically, this goes up and goes to this, right? So this is an X10
controller, and it does up to 16 devices, right? So again, you need one, two devices,
four devices, 16 devices. You can pick a different remote that does that for you, okay?
So, you know, I think this is kind of a good example. What I, you'll notice, I did not get
outlets that, no, X10. I just got plug-in things. Why did I do that? I don't want to spend one
Saturday a month, like, pulling out my outlets and fixing them. They've been very reliable,
but at the same time, I may not stay with this technology. I don't necessarily want to rip
everything out. I don't mind seeing a little white box there. It's easier for me. And if
something doesn't work, I can just plug another one in and debug it, like, real quick, right?
Because it may not be the bug. It may be the box. It just makes it real easy. Okay.
Okay. Pool pump, I talked about this. Basically, I have a pool, and I want to turn the pump on.
Normally, this is done with the big timer dial. Remember, we talked about the timers with the
little dial, and, you know, it goes around 20, every 24 hours. The problem with that is that
I want the pump to run more when it's hot and less when it's not hot, because the hotter it is,
the longer you have to run the pump. So, by controlling it, and this is right here, this
little X10 switch right here, right, in this little box, you can basically figure out what,
how warm is it outside? You ask the weather service, how warm is it outside? And then,
depending on how warm it is, that's how long the pump runs. And my pool people will come,
and they'll say, you should sell this. And I'm like, well, I could, but then I have to have a
controller, and I have to have some way of programming it to get the weather. And it's not,
what I found, it's very hard to, to productize a lot of the home automation stuff in general.
Because everyone's need is different, and to productize it, it's kind of, it's kind of difficult.
This is a command open source program called hey you, which actually controls X10.
I've used this, I guess, since I've been using X10. There basically is an interface between
the electric plug right there, and a serial cable, yes, serial, that comes out here,
and goes over to here where my server is, right here. Okay, so this goes out, and then I think
currently it goes into a little USB adapter, which converts serial to USB, and then the USB goes in,
and Linux has no trouble communicating serial to that. So you can see the sort of network interface
between, right, you've gone from Linux to USB to serial, and then to power to X10. Kind of interesting.
Okay, I can monitor what's happening, so here is a report of what has happened at the house,
all of the activity that's happened, so I can basically say okay this is happening, this is
happening, this is happening, and I can look and get a log of that. This is a shell bash script
that I wrote, which effectively monitors what happens in X10, and then it takes different actions
depending on what happens. So if somebody does one thing, I say go do this other thing,
is it too late, do this other thing, don't do it, if it's too late in the day,
people might be asleep, are we ready to eat, there's all these things that happen. For example,
when somebody hits a button in the kitchen, it sends a message to all of the terminals in the
house, all the laptops in the house saying it's time to eat. There's a slideshow in the kitchen,
big banner comes up, time to eat for 20 seconds, and there's also an X10 chime, so there's little
X10 modules that make like a little ding dong sound, like a doorbell, and I put them in different
parts of the house, so when they press it, there's this little ding dong, you hear different parts
of the house, people know it's time to eat. I tried it first just making one really loud sound
that didn't work well, because when you were in the room that made the loud sound, it was very
annoying, and when you were far away, you didn't hear it, so to do that, I had to kind of spread it
out. So again, you're looking at some input, and you're looking at some output, and that's kind of
the way you have to think of it. So what inputs do I use? I use the time of day, I have dust on
sensors to know how late it is outside, I use wireless remotes, I use caller ID, I'll talk about
that in a minute. I even have telephone dialing, so I can actually, I don't know if you're familiar
with modems, but you can still buy modems, and you can make them dial the telephone. So you can
have like a, instead of dialing it yourself, you can tell the computer, take this address book entry
and dial it, and I'll just pick up the phone and talk to them. So it kind of makes it convenient for
people. Even things like outside temperature you can get from websites. And then outputs, we can do
lights, we can turn on motors like the pool pump, we can do appliances like the coffee maker, I'll
tell you that when we get there. I can make sounds, I can make broadcast messages on the laptops,
and I can even have a slideshow, have a big screen to say, time to eat, or somebody's
arrived in the garage. This is maybe overwhelming, but it's basically a layout of the first floor
of my house. Here's the server right here. So remember I show you that little adapter, the serial
adapter with the X10, that's actually right, that's number four. Here are the yellows, our lights,
that are controlled. Here is the sunset sensor. Here is, yeah, so this is where you have a remote,
you can tell people to do stuff. One of the interesting things, you'll notice that the lights
at the front of the house, you see all these lights right here, they turn on right before dusk,
right, when it's getting dark. But what I realized is that why would I turn the lights on always at
the same intensity every day? What I'll do is I'll randomly have different intensity lights
every time I turn them on. So if you look at my house one day, maybe the garage will be brighter,
and the front door will be dimmer, and then the next day, the porch will be brighter,
and the front door will be brighter, and the garage will be dimmer, right. So it just adds a
little bit of variety to how people view your house, and kind of, it's like a neat little thing.
I think it's kind of cool. Let's see here. Yeah, so this is, basically this is walking you through
how, you know, how the system works. I think it's kind of interesting. Any questions?
Yes, sir. So the question is, does the X10 link to your neighbors as well? So technically,
X10 will broadcast up until your transformer. If you're familiar with the transformer,
it turns out that my run goes right from my house to the transformer, so I don't have other people
between me and the transformer, so I don't think anyone else sees it. However, if you're sharing
a transformer with other people on the same wire, they will absolutely see it, and that's
why they have the house codes. So if you find that somebody's using your house code, you may
switch to a different house code, and therefore you will not see interference from them. Great
question. Okay, yes. Can you have a filter in your mains? Absolutely, they sell filters that
will filter your mains, and therefore it doesn't leak out to the rest of the house. Yeah, great
question. I'm going to keep going here. So I promised I was going to talk about what success
looks like. Basically, adding home automation changes your family's home environment.
Good or bad, right? I recommend you start slow, because my brother, he had seen me do it,
and he kind of went all in. But the reaction I got from, I just talked to my wife last night,
and she was at a funeral. My uncle actually had a funeral on Friday that I unfortunately missed,
but she was talking to my sister-in-law, and she was complaining about the fact that
when she does not know how to control the lights in the house. There are different voice commands,
and she can't remember what my brother called that device. I told maybe we put labels on
things so you can remember what we called them for the voice commands, but it's not a good situation
to be in when your family is feeling like they don't have control, because it's their house too,
and they want to feel like they certainly should feel comfortable in controlling their environment,
and if you kind of come in too strong, you can bypass them. So in fact, my trick was that
I put in home automation just for the outside lights, and my wife, month later, she said,
can you do this one lamp for me? I said, sure, and I waited four weeks, and I was really excited to
do it, but I'm going to wait a couple of weeks, and then I did it, because I didn't want her to
feel like I just was trying to move it too fast. It's been very incremental, and that has allowed
people to look at it as a positive versus I think sometimes can look at as a negative.
Except that some automation tests are impossible, and again, you've succeeded when a family member
asks for a home automation addition. That is your gold standard. Keep an eye on that one,
because if you don't get there, I would say you're kind of full, and this is actually a
great article. Smart home gadgets, still a hard sell. Wall Street Journal article right there.
So challenges. Change is hard. Reliability. So sometimes it's hard for family members to
understand how it's working. Device longevity, I talked about that. Maintenance, I talked about
what happens if something breaks. The cost, I talked about that, and then, of course, security,
privacy are also important, and again, we have a nice talk about the Nest thermostat bug.
It leaves users in the cold. Not a good experience there. So be aware. It's scary sometimes.
So let's just run through this, and I'm going to take some questions.
So this is mostly just a Q&A part. I mean, show and tell. So here are the modems I use,
where it actually, again, serial cables going up to USB, but I have two phone lines, and
it's just modems. Not only can I dial the number, but I can get caller ID, so I can get caller ID
and show to everyone in the house who's calling on the phone. You don't have to look at the phone,
you see it on your computer. Really kind of nice. I can log all the telephone calls coming in.
I can dial the phone, as I said before. Again, I use caller ID to broadcast messages and to make
it shine if it's somebody important, like a family member. And I end up taking the caller ID,
I look it up in my telephone directory, and then I know who it is, and I can actually give a text
message. Instead of just a number, I can customize what it looks like. I can make outgoing calls,
as I said before. This is the second floor, or is the first floor. Again, talking about
how all the pieces work together. This coffee maker is kind of fun. Second floor, again, some lights,
some chimes, and some wireless remotes. So you can kind of see they're kind of spread out
in different parts of the house. And here's the pool pump out here. This is what the, hey,
you can fig file looks like. You basically define your codes, and then the names that go with each
of those codes. Here's what X10 commands look like. Here's the standard timer. Here's a crontab.
Of course, we're running on Linux, so we can crontab schedule a whole bunch of stuff, right?
Works just very seamlessly, very easy to control for me, anyway. Dawn Dusk sensor, I talked about
that. Here's a remote that you can use to control. This is the coffee maker, kind of hilarious.
The way we do it is my aunt lives with us, and she usually gets up early. So my wife has a remote
next to the bed, and when she wakes up, she presses the remote, and then it makes a chime in my aunt's
area, and that means my aunt should, it turns on the coffee maker for her, okay? So I saw somebody
look at their spouse. So yeah, so the cool thing is that you have to have an aunt to set it up for
you, or something of an automated coffee system if you don't have an aunt. But the cool thing is
you hit the button when you're about to get out of bed, and by the time you get downstairs,
your coffee's ready, okay? Here's the coffee maker timer. It only turns around for like 15 minutes,
so it doesn't stay on for very long. And she also has a little button on her phone,
so if she's driving home, as she's heading home, she can hit the button, and then everyone, yeah,
yeah, okay. I'll just leave it there. So this is how it actually works on the phone. I actually
have an, it actually does an SSH session, and then calls an X10 command, and then logs out,
basically, okay? Pool pump, job scheduler, weather for the website, wireless remote.
This is kind of an interesting case, garage entry detection. I'm not going to get into this, but
effectively what I ended up doing was to put an X10 switch up at the top, and when the door comes
up, it detects it and just pushes a little lever, and I have an X10 control with like wires,
and it sends a signal to say somebody closed the contact, and I know somebody came in the garage,
okay? And again, that's exactly, that's what it looks like right there, right? There's the,
there's the lever, right? And there's the X10, so the wires go up here, and then it plugs in,
and then it goes right to the computer, and the computer does everything, okay?
Okay, all right. Okay, let's take some questions. Yes, sir.
Right, so how would you implement this with modern technology that didn't have as many
moving parts? So my son, I would say, has done that. He's doing ZigBee, so everything's controlled
with his phone, and he's using HomeKit. So basically, he's using, instead of using switches,
he's using light bulbs that are ZigBee enabled, and, but he's still using some X10 stuff because
he wants a physical switch on the wall. So I think the question is, are you happy with doing
everything on your phone? That's the question, right? If I walk into a room, do I want to pull
my phone out to turn the lights on, right? I think he's okay with that, and there's a whole
bunch of cool stuff you can do like proximity when he's getting, when his car is getting near the
house, cool stuff can happen. So there's a lot of potential there, but because I'm trying to
bridge the old and new technology together, that's why it looks so kind of hokey. One more question,
let's see if I can get it. Right here. Right. So you're basically, clearly, to be said, you've
basically gone largely for X10, which is wired, and you are more of a power user slash thinker.
So, but the dealing of the kind of like average user who's got no idea what exactly a smart home
does, and or what their smart home assistant sends to the big tech, how would you talk to
such people about home automation, because we've got the game, oh, we want your lightbulb connected
to the Wi-Fi, oh, I've got this cat flap is connected to the Wi-Fi and everything. And then
they end up with a situation they can't switch the lights on at home because the power went off.
Is how would I start if I didn't do nothing? And I would just say get a, get a lightbulb that has
a phone control, and they just kind of get started with it. But you're going to be on a 10-year
journey potentially, because it didn't start this way. It started just with the out front lights,
and it grew over time as I found need. So again, my goal was not really to talk about technology,
but to figure out how to think about that technology in relation to you, your family,
and your home. So thank you.