Home Automation

I have automated as many things in my house as possible.

Here's a few of them:

Gas and electricity monitoring for every device in the house
Air quality for all the rooms
Weather with UV and pollen
Alarm triggers
Upcoming deliveries
Clear skies for astronomy
Star count
Thermal camera for cats at the front door
News
Thermal camera for oven hob
Humidity and temperature for all rooms

All can be controlled by voice, iPhone, web and radio remote.
I have a few simple radio remote controls scattered about the house. They are essential when things are noisy, or it's the middle of the night and I'm trying to be quiet.

I also have a homemade Alexa Skill called Magic Minion that handles some of the more interactive queries, such as adding things to my To Do list.

In general, Alexa is used primarily to turn things off and on, including the execution of status scripts which provide updates back through the Amazon Echo from which it was called.
For example, I might want to know the air quality in my lounge. "Echo, turn on lounge status" will result in the stats from my lounge FooBot being spoken through the Echo speaker (or whatever it is connected to at the time).

Here is a bit more detail:

Control

First we start with how to get things to do stuff, how to control it.
The key principle is that Home Automation works seamlessly and with as little conscious effort as possible. My primary inputs are Voice through the Amazon Echo in each room of the house

these LightWaveRF simple RF remote controls



and a Domoticz app running on my iPhone



I experimented with a few other control methods, including:

Gesture controls: too near-field, too much accuracy required

Laser-beam break: not enough options available, ie too binary

Blinking: too unreliable at distance (sat on sofa) but GREAT at a pc

Infra-red movement: excellent for simple stuff - e.g: you stand up and the film pauses and the lights come on, but doesn't easily allow for grabbing a beer without interrupting the film. Which is essential.

Next Page - Why an Amazon Echo?

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