Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Home Automation

You probably have a bunch of ideas about how you want your new light to

behave, but before you go too crazy, just live with the intelligent light for

a week or so. You'll then have a better sense of how you want to tweak the

script or rearrange the setup to better suit the needs of your home. Some

specific things to think about are:

• Does the light turn on when nothing is there, or not turn on when you

need it? If so, you may need to move the motion detector.

• Does the dusk detection of the motion detector work as you hoped? If

not, you might be better off turning the light on at a specific time of day.

This would require you to modify only a couple lines of the script.

• Has your electrical bill changed as a result? If it’s changed for the worse,

you might want to tweak the behavior to reduce the time the light is

on.

• Does the script run reliably? If it fails because your computer is often

offline, you might need to run it on a dedicated computer. You can use

really, really low-end computer hardware to run this script, and the

software is entirely free if you use Linux, so the dedicated computer

could actually end up costing less than the X10 parts!

To determine if the project was worthwhile, stop the script. Do the other

people in your household miss it?

Extensions

This project shows you the potential of the X10 computer ...