Why Home Automation?
Because it's fun !! Why do people collect stamps, grow bonsai trees, buy a
new car every 2 years? Just ask them...
Walking into a room and the lights are automatically turned on, monitoring gas and
energy usage but not having to write down the meter reading and type it into a Excel
sheet, saving energy by turning off lights when no motion is detected in the garage,
all those things. Domotica combines almost all of the things i'm interested in.
What else do you need as an argument...
I've always been interested in making devices communicate with 'the outside'. This
started when i was 9 years old, when i got a "Philips Experimenteer doos" as a birthday
present.
You could make a radio with it or a burglar alarm, a light sensitive switch, all
kinds of things. I had my own burglar alarm for my bedroom when i was 9 years old..
;-)
During my schooltime, i once got an assignment to write a program
in assembly (Motorola 6809) to control an array of leds connected to it. This must
have been somewhere around 1986. I wanted that at home too...but times were very
different back then. Limited mobililty, limited funds, no "hobby-shops" nearby that
i knew of, so it was difficult to achieve something on your own in this direction. The word "webshop"
didn't even exist back then...
However, whenever i had the opportunity, steps were taken. For example, somewhere
early 90's i got a hold of instructions on how to make a sound card by using the
parallel port of the PC: i still have the board, but most components are stripped
along the years:
You could connect it to the line-in of your stereo and you had sound coming from
your PC! Wow...
My first real job was at the Hogeschool Enschede (HTS) at the Energy lab, where
i made an installation with which you could do efficiency-calculations on central
heating systems. This installation was built from scratch; selecting instruments
like gasmeters, flowmeters, temperature meters and ofcourse later on building the
whole installation around a central heating and programming the software. Here's
a screendump of the software that controlled the whole installation:
The software was gathering it's information primarily by means of serial I/O and
analog I/O devices from Analog Devices. All incoming data was shown on the screen
and the software let you operate the central heating manually (on, off) or automatically
by entering a setpoint for a particular temperature.
Meanwhile it calculated all kinds of data needed to do efficiency-calculations and
logged them to a file for later analysis.
Here's some more pictures of this installation for efficiency calculations on central
heatings:
This was the time i really got interested in connecting all kinds of devices to
a PC and communicating with it.
Later on i bought a Velleman K8000 kit. This kit had several ways of communicating
with the outside world: it made digital as well as analog I/O possible. However,
how were i to control the lights in my house with it...i would need several K8000's
and too much cables running through the house... so this K8000 was nice, but was
no solution to my goal.
Years went by where nothing really happened, till the summer of 2005. Someone i
know was putting hundreds of temperature sensors in his new house. That's how i
got to know 1-Wire. And by googling over the Internet, i found the website of Pieter
Knuvers,
www.Bwired.nl. Man, this was it!! This guy has
built everything i ever wanted but didn't know how to accomplish! From that day
on my life changed, it was as if i had found what i'd been looking for all those
years... regarding hobby's, i mean...
Need i say more?