House: The Beginning

This voyage starts in 1996 when I build a house and decide to make it smart. This is way before the days of IoT and compatible smart home devices and even before the days of cheap and reliable wireless communication.

House: The Conclusion

After waiting literally 20 years for technology to catch up with my smart home design I have what I believe is a good solution.

Note, by the way, that these use no batteries. Power busses run in the basement and attic to each room. Motion sensors are powered from…

The Room Controller : Software

The Photon Software is straightforward.

During setup it tries to figure out a few things. Which board rev — if there is a thermistor on A0 it’s a new V2 board. Which thermistors are connected — disconnected ports will read high due to the pullups…

House: The Middle

For various reasons the house automation project went on hold for over 10 years. In 2007 I started looking at completing the project.

This was much closer to today’s technology. I wanted to use a standard for communication so decided on Zigbee. The best Zigbee solution…