Misterhouse - a Home Driven by Perl Scripts

An anonymous submitter copies from the website: "MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It's fun, it's free, and it's entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. It can talk, it can check your messages, control the lights, program your VCR, and what is best - it understands spoken commands. It can even track your car by interfacing to a TNC. And there are 600 users and 209 authors contributing to this project. Cool, eh?"

Comments

Very similar to MIT's Project Oxygen

[Jerk City Troll]

MIT's Project Oxygen is a very similar concept. It's meant to create intelligent environments that respond to your routines and commands as well. Naturally, Oxygen seems to be far more complete, but less likely to fall into the hands of just about anyone. Check out their site, it's a great read.

Hardware

[Apreche]

That's just great. But one thing... What kind of hardware do I need to connect my computer to all the devices in my house? Does it support wireless? I would assume that the site would have the answers I'm looking for, but it's a bit /.ed.

Software does me no good if I don't have the hardware to make it work.

Tried MisterHouse

[Your_Mom]

I've tried MisterHouse (a year ago, take this with a large helping of NaCl), and I was not that impressed by it. It has all these "Gee Whiz" features, and there are some neat things, but you need to run it on a dedicated box, with a lot of horsepower. I would much rather have a smaller, more compact version with less features.

If you have the computing power to use it though, try it, it's fun :)

Re:Tried MisterHouse

[kfhickel]

I looked at MisterHouse, and it's cool, but for me, it was more of a kit than a solution.

I have to deal with cranky perl code (and C, C++ and Java) all day at work, I don't want to have to do it to get my lights to work.

I run HomeSeer (windows only) http://www.homeseer.com and it was much easier to set up out of the box, but you do have to pay for it.
-Kelly

Bluetooth

[Pendersempai]

Imagine this technology combined with a simple Bluetooth ID that you can carry in your wallet:

• Lights turn on as you enter a room and turn off as you leave it
• The music you play on your networked audio system follows you from room to room
• The movie you're playing pauses automatically when you go to the bathroom
• The heat is turned down when you leave the house
• Your rooms of your house, in general, snap to attention at your presence and stand at ease when you've passed

Re:Bluetooth

[TotallyUseless]

you mean something like this?

Re:Bluetooth

[surprise_audit]

All of which are just fine if you're the single occupant of the room (or even house), but when there are multiple other occupants, there'd better be some very good conflict resolution software in the loop.

Sure, it's easy enough to count the folks in any given room and make the decision to turn the lights off when the last person leaves, but what if I like the lights bright and my wife doesn't? If I'm in the room with the lights bright and she walks in, should it dim the lights? Pick some point between our two references? Same goes for TV channels/volume, room temp, etc.

And what about visitors? Imagine a SuperBowl party where the host leaves the room to take a leak and the TV shuts down... Guess you'd need to hand out IDs as visitors enter the house...

It would still be cool, though. :)

Re:Bluetooth

[Tokerat]

User configuration is of course they key here.

The controlling computer should have a configure menu (of course only activated when you walk up to it :-) which would allow you to decide things like how to mix specific settings between two people. Perhaps you could have a group of settings specific to you, your wife, and then one for the both of you, in each room.

Also, I would imagine panels in each room which would allow for overrides, perhaps a small touch-sensitive LCD screen, or even one of those PDA-looking remotes currently used for home theaters. That way your wife can keep the lights dim, say, until your presence is detected for more than 30 seconds, at which time the system decides you've joined her and corrects the enviroment. Or you can enter a room and change settings for that room, and press a "hold" button to leave the room that way indefinately, which cures your SuperBowl party problem. Once everyone else leaves for the night, just tap that hold button to return to normal scheduled/automated settings. Hell, my thermostat does this now...

If I had one of these systems, I'd kind of be ticked if it wasn't 100% custom-configurable, so the whole Perl script control idea is just about how I'd like it to work.

Fewer brownouts due to airconditioners?

[bentfork]

The site says that it has speach capabilities. I really like this one:

Notice, the sun is bright at 32 percent, and it is cold outside at 24 degrees, so I am opening the curtains at 8:07 AM

Actions similar to this can save a lot of energy. Curtains are a super efficient way to control internal temperatures, if and when they are uses correctly. How many of you remembed to close your blinds before you went work? ;)

Now if there was only a script that would output this:

I noticed there were dirty dishes in the sink when you went to bed last night. They have been places in the dishwasher. [Insert spouse name here] will be pleased.

240 V Network, e.g. Europe?

[stere0]

Apparently, all the hardware supported by MisterHouse runs on 120V.

Having to use 240->120 and 120->240 transformers would be practically impossible. Does anyone know of hardware that would work on this side of the Atlantic?

Re:/.'d already...

[arivanov]

Nope, but not for the reason you have been thinking of.

Mister House (which itself is OK) is usually used to drive X10 hardware which excuse me for the engineering language is a crock of shit. Low bandwidth (several bits per second) shared bus over power line. Once you got past 4-5 peripherals and it has just started to look really usefull you start getting gremlins. Lights coming on and off by themselves, central heating going haywire and so on. Most importantly it starts taking up to 10 seconds for some of the sensors to respond to a poll. So your garage lamp gets turned on 10 seconds after your IR sensor reacts.

No thanks.

Do not smoke this shit (have friends who do though). Once I am done with all the current house work I will wire some of the stuff but it will be using good ole cat5 for the sensors on dedicated wiring. And good ole cat5 to the relays once again on dedicated wiring. And some use for some good ole serial boards that will otherwise byte the bullet. Possibly once again driven by a heavily modified mister house but no X10.

X10 in general

[slasher999]

For those that don't know, X10 is the protocol behind a lot of the Home Automation hardware out there. I've been using a Windows based software solution for a few years now - HomeSeer - and it's fantastic. Runs on my wife's Windows 2000 workstation (that is always on). I've considered Mister House many times over the past few years, but never tried it out myself.

There are X10 solutions for use in Europe as well. Here's a jumping off point:

http://www.x-10europe.com/

Good luck!

Home Automation through web services

[bomblaster]

A group of 5 students (including myslef) did the same thing around 2 years back during our third year in CS - October 2001 - for the Microsoft Asia Student .NET competition. Implemented the Home Automation service as an XML web service that could be consumed by external applications (after authentication of course :) ) to view home status information as well as trigger actions on home devices remotely.
The devices were controlled by a software gateway on a central home computer thru Wi-Fi and the specifications for communication between the gateway and the home device were encapsulated in an XML driver.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2001/n ov01/11-14asia.asp
http://it.asia1.com.sg/newsdaily/news003_20011030. html

Re:sourceforge.net

[jandrese]

Ugh, X10. I've used a fair bit of X10 stuff in my lifetime, and I'm quite convinced that they need to fire their current quality control people. Here's a list of the components and their reliability:

• Transciever modules, these are basically appliance modules with an antenna to recieve RF commands and a transmitter to relay them through the power lines. These are generally fairly reliable, although you need one for both phases of the power in your house, and they can act screwey (like not working when you plug in an extension cord). There is no way to make it not device 1 however, which is annoying since you need 2 of them in the house. The maximum power spec is rather low to boot.
• Appliance modules, simple on/off that accepts commands through the power line: pretty reliable, I've not had much trouble with these.
• Lamp modules, has circutry for dimming as well as on/off. Not designed to be used with anything but incandescent light bulbs: Completely unreliable. Lamps come on at random, the modules will stop responding to commands, etc... Usually it takes less than a week or two before the thing fails on me, and I've had a least half a dozen of these things over the years.
• Slimline switchs: The buttons wear out in about 2 months. Eats batteries like crazy.
• Regular big old white remotes: extremely reliable (havn't had a problem with one yet!), sips battery power (but it does need quite a few AAs). I've mounted these on the walls instead of the slimline switches
• Bottlerockets: Sometimes they don't like certain machines. I can't get it to work at all on a couple of my machines, but when they do work they're extremely reliable.
• Motion sensor: Failed within a month, lousy range.
• Replacement Wall Switch: About as reliable as a lamp module

To be fair, a lot of my X10 hardware has come from those free starter packs, but other than the lamp modules, that starter pack seems to include all of the reliable equipment. My opinion of X10 is that their stuff is good for demos, but not really ready for full time use.

Re:/.'d already...

[Smidge204]

I don't understand why making a computer the primary control for everything in the house has such appeal. Especially things like lighting and heating.

Most occupancy sensors have a built in set of contacts (optionally two sets sometimes) specifically for switching lights. If you want to monitor or override the sensor with a central computer, that's perfectly doable... but there's no sense in sending a signal half way across the house, prosessing it, and sending a signal all the way back when the sensor itself is perfectly capable of dealing with it directly.

Same thing with heating. If you're going to need a thermostat for each room/zone anyway, why not let it control the heating directly and have the central computer step in only as a secondary control? No lag, more robust (since otherwise the computer presents a single point of failure) and probably more modular.

A simple stand-alone controller to open and close window shades (for example) can be built for a few bucks each, and you'ld probably only need one per room, if that many. What would it take? Photo cell of some kind, relay, power supply, small PIC or other microcontroller package, and a motor. No big deal!

Running a dedicated wire is still a good idea regardless. *maybe* using one or two X10 devices for things that might not lend themselves to hardwiring, or something you might not have around long enough to warrent dedicated controls. (Holiday lights maybe? I dunno...)
=Smidge=

Re:/.'d already...

[Whatever Fits]

Actually, it may use X10 commonly as that is the cheapest/most common way of controlling your house, but if you read the lists you find that many people use these cool Weeder digital I/O boards, alarm systems, I-Buttons, and all sorts of other home control systems that are countless it seems. I'm working on doing that myself, now that I'm a homeowner, but money is tight, now that I'm a homeowner.

Also if it doesn't support it today, it will as soon as you write the interface for it, which is usually quite simple. Most of these control devices have some sort of serial connection which makes it very easy to code for.

I've been using MisterHouse for quite some time now and am actually a contributing author. Me and 208 other people! ;)

two year user here

[LinuxHam]

not sure why this is suddenly news.. and yes, the cheap x10 gear is exactly that. My ActiveHome controller was making the rest of the network flaky. Commands suddenly stopped executing, and when I disconnected it from the wall, all of a sudden the lamp modules would start executing all of the commands that had been building up! Lights turning off and on for a few minutes.. quite a sight to see. I also used to reboot my cablemodem every 30 mins during the early days because the performance would degrade to the point of uselessness in that time frame. I had planned to run a job to reboot the cm whenever ping times rose above a certain limit, but Comcast fixed the problem before I needed to automate that function.

I've also been waiting for some usable code to receive button presses from my MR26A wireless receiver. Until then, my Misterhouse is one-way only.. turning on lights, either at sunset or when I'm scheduled to arrive so long as that time is between sunset and 8pm. The light in the kitchen also blinks at sunset on trash night, which is when our condo rules state we can put the trash out. I've also bought a ham radio specifically for the purpose of using the car tracking features, but I still have to pick up the PIC-E from TAPR and wire it all up.

I was just cracking my knuckles and about to dig back in to MH, too, because it already offers a tv schedule browser in grid format with "click here to record" functionality. TivoWeb lets you search the tv schedule but not browse it in grid format. I will code MH to schedule a recording on the Tivo over the LAN whenever I select a show to record from the MH grid. I have thought about getting an Audrey for that purpose in the living room.

And I, too, dream about walking through the house and have the lights and tv react appropriately. This is where the "$sleeping" variable has helped greatly -- by not having lights turn on automatically when my wife came to bed after I was asleep. No matter which light she requested to turn on, the farthest one away would turn on at 10-20% bright so as to not wake me up if the system knew/thought I was still asleep. The days of, "its okay, Alfred, I'm awake" are still a ways off, though :) Read or watch "Demon Seed" to see why we call the system "Alfred". Its more personable than "Proteus".

Oh, and something most everyone seemed to miss here, is that MH natively supports VoiceXML which means it integrates with Tell Me @ 800-555-TELL. Yes, you can call an 800 # and interact, by voice, with your home automation system totally free of charge, using text instead of voice (on the server end) and therefore significantly less horsepower. I run mine on a Pentium 75 with 48MB RAM and a thinned down RH71 or RH72 on a 1.2GB disk.

Zone heating/cooling

[Frank of Earth]

Would be cool to do [no pun]. I have duct'd heat and AC and no zone. Using some automatic duct dampners, a few 1-wire temperature sensors and a program to tie it all together, you could effectivelly setup each room in your house with a specific comfort level.

I was going to do this for my own house, but the automatic duct dampners were not cheap and I don't trust my computer programming when it comes to controlling heat and ac ;-)

"Why is the electric bill so high in January, honey?"

"Oh slight bug converting C to F and the AC was on in the guest room for 4 days straight."