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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?"
This may be the first time that we can slashdot a house!
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.
Join Tor today!
209 Perl programmers coding scripts to run my house. Who would be insane enough to run that code? All thoughts about the maintainability of Perl aside I find I require my house to do very little text processing.
... will he still be able to unlock the door when he gets home from work?
http://www.virtualvillagesquare.com/ Online Communities: The Next Generation
MISTERHOUSE: I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that...
Yikes!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Simply shout "Shut the curtains, switch off the lights, disable the alarm and unlock the front door" through the letter box.
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
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
1. Start a project /.
2. Succeed in making a good project
3. Get noticed by
4. Loose your bandwith allocation for the next year
5. Go under because the bandwith nazi creditors are after your free project.
Looks like they are midway between 3 and 4... huummm =P
Course listing at the local Home Depot:
7:30 Kitchen and Bathroom Tile installation
8:30 Decorator Paint techniques
9:00 Perl syntax for home automation
Name your house's components:
my($Wall) = "Larry";
Don't hit me with that chain again.
Imagine this technology combined with a simple Bluetooth ID that you can carry in your wallet:
Just to clarify: X10 is a standard. It's not inherently evil. It only seems that way because of the company that is also called X10 (the one that does the pop-ups, etc.).
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:
After all . . .
.) your not really sure whose member method your picking it up with. Using the bathroom is right out.
The house that PERL built:
. . . has more entrances than you know what to do with, and most of them lead to the same room anyway. Random geeks walk by and obfuscate your living room for fun.
The house that RUBY built:
. . . makes eating dinner confusing, as when you drop your spork (an instance of class spork, which multiply inherits from classes spoon and fork, two subclasses of class utensil, a subclass of . .
The house that LUA built:
. . . swing at the large rat. You hit! The large rat disappears in a cloud of red mist. You have killed the large rat. The grid bug misses. The grid bug misses. You are jolted by the grid bug. There is a fountain here. Do you drink from it? (y/n) Your god is angry with you. Curse the day that all the nethack and angband developers integrated lua into their games. The grid bug misses . . .
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
Hardware List (taken from FAQ:
:)
(Google Cache)
6.8 What sort of hardware do you have in your house?
This is what is currently (04/2001) in Bruce's house (see mh/docs/mh.* 'List of supported hardware interfaces' for more info):
- Mh running on a dual 600 PIII Win 2K box great for quick mh debugging
- SB Live Value sound card (supports simultaneous sound sources)
- PCI ByteRunner 8 port serial card
- PCI phone modem for callerid logging and announcements
- Linux box for hosting misterhouse.net
- 5 other networked computers for mp3 client/servers, shoutcast server, games, writing, and work from home
- Radio Shack PA amp with a PA speaker in each room
- Wiring closet with 3 DIO weeder cards and 2 analog cards
- 16 relay card from jameco for PA speaker switch
- Home brew motor/relays for up/down control of 9 Window quilt curtains
- RF sensor in the mailbox across the steet
- WX200 weather station from Radio Shack
- Relays controling garage door and furnace heat and fan
- Digital input sensors on doors and garage door
- A few iButtons for testing
- X10 IR commander and CM17 for sending IR signals
- X10 CM11 with X10 consoles in each room for control
- X10 motion sensors, light, and appliance modules
- Matrix-orbital LCD keypad for local output and control
- WAP cell phone for remote queries and control
- A ham radio TNC for tracking 2 GPS APRS equipped cars
- NetGear router with mh monitored SYSLOG data for tracking internet traffic
- MSVoice VR via a Andrea Desktop Array microphone
Someone asked what it can run on, I'm using it on my RH Linux 7.3 box on an AMD 400MHz with 256M RAM and a 30G drive (30% used). I've got 12 serial port in use (caller ID, weather station, CM11a, HCS II, dallas one wire network, etc. ). I need to put some more work into it but in a couple of weeks I'll be moving one of my Audrey's into the living room so we have a touch screen interface to MH from there. MH may not be a simple DIY project but it is extremely powerful. I have it turning things on and off as needed (such as printers attached to print servers, uses X10 to turn on and off the printer). I've got more than X10 but we don't want this message to get too long. Linux Home Automation
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ncherry/
http://linuxha.sourceforge.net/
http://hcs.sourceforge.net/
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.
n ov01/11-14asia.asp
. html
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/
http://it.asia1.com.sg/newsdaily/news003_20011030
- 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.I read the internet for the articles.
MisterHouse has been around for a while now and mainly relies on X10 modules. It works fairly well but as one other poster noted it really does need a dedicated box with a bit of muscle or it's a bit slow and frustrating to use. I came across it while looking for X10 software for linux, which it runs on as well as OSX and most versions of Windows. There are many similar products out there for Windows, Mac and even a few simple ones for linux. The most popular/commercial product was a piece of software for the ActiveHome module that came as part of IBM's Home Director kit (I can't remember what the old version was now it comes with HomeVoice). In all my years of using X10 I'd still have to say XTension for the Mac was one of the coolest products out there as it let you create a floorplan pretty easily and it ran well on an old 75Mhz PPC. Lately I've just been using Heyu which is a simple command line interface for linux that supports macros. Anything I want to do I can set a cron job to do automagically or start an ssh session and do from work or wherever. Sure there's no voice control, but personally I always felt a little weird even using speech recognition on the Mac, it could never quite understand "Who's your daddy?" -peel
At the smarthome link, there are lots of third-party X10 compatible stuff. My favorite's the IR receiver that works with any programmable IR remote. Eliminates the need for the transceiver, but still works on one "phase" (in the USA there are two leads that are 240V to each other, but 120 to ground, but they're not really separate phases, otherwise you'd have about 210V to each other). Okay, the solution is a bridging capacitor, also available at Smarthome. Throw in across the "phases" in the circuit breaker box, and the X10 signal traverses them both. No need for a second anything.
--Jim (me)