We’ve been slightly distracted by the sale of our house in Bournemouth and the subsequent arrival of quite a lot of stuff… However, we have been working on the interface a little and I’ll write another entry or two about this shortly. Progress is also being made on the decorating, installation of the dozens of X10 Din Rail Modules and routing of cables to the future node zero.

After quite a lot of effort, with my new Dremel, I’ve created a nice box for the VIOM. This means we have computer control of a set of curtains now - one relay does the open signal and one for the close signal. Once the cables are fitted to the board - which is quite fiddly - it should be a simple matter of cabling with RJ11 connectors.

I’ve been looking into controllable coloured lighting for a while. I’d like to be able to have coloured lighting and be able to control the colour programmatically. (No disco lighting effects! Just a gentle colour wash for mood lighting.) I discovered the DMX standard which is used for stage and disco lighting and also increasingly for architectural lighting. Trouble is, much of it is quite pricy. Pulsar do a nice range of LED lighting - the Chroma Range.

We like clocks in our house. Sadly though we are rubbish at changing them so half of them are usual on GMT even in the summer. However, we’ve come up with a solution. Most of the clocks have the same small mechanism on the back. A while back we brought some of these Radio Controlled Clocks from TLC Direct. The mechanisms looked very similar. So we took one apart and converted our cool “man” clock in to a radio controlled clock.

My first real attempt to build a temperature sensor that would be suitable to mount on the wall was not a success. The telephone coupler from a diy store was just to fiddly to fit the bits inside. However, I still liked the idea so I tried these Junction Boxes from ScrewFix. I paid 4 pounds for five on the off chance they might be okay. Well, they were better than okay.

We started having trouble with our Harmony dimmer a couple of days ago. It was working fine from the switch and but not responding to X10 commands. We tried resetting it, but no change. Then we noticed that the kettle wasn’t responding as reliably as usual, and the curtains also seemed to be a bit slow to respond. Not good when we’re planning to add more X10 devices. Today we decided to try unplugging the electrical items that we had recently added to the house and see if any of those made a difference.

My Tech Supplies order [1] arrived today, so this evening I made up my first temperature sensor. We got a simple sensor working along the lines of the one described the web site for the digitemp software that we are using to read the sensors from the computer.

The first thing we did with the Dawn and Dusk Autoglide Curtain Track was to open up the light sensor and the switch to see how they were wired up. The light sensor is just a light sensitive resistor and the switch was a simple momentary switch. (Too simple really. It’s quite naff really but I suppose we’ve been spoilt by the better looking blind motor switches.) Since our cheap Maplin crimp tool wasn’t really doing a great job, we decided to sacrifice the dawn and dusk sensor.

This is going to be the heart (or maybe that should be brain) of our automated home. At the moment it’s named “slave” after a computer from Blake’s Seven. If it works out well enough we might rename it “Orac” or “Zen”. I’m hoping there is enough space in there to fit in a PCI serial card and hide the VIOM in some of the spare space.

Wow! Found this excellent site for ideas - Inhabitat. It’s worth clicking on some of the categories to see some of the older articles. My particular favourites are: calendar tetris shelving led table bamboo table puzzle table That’ll certainly be added to my every growing list of sites to visit regularly.