Carlos' House
 Home  SmartHouse  New Projects  Resources
 

What Carlos' House is...
This site is the web front interface to my PC powered automated home in Houston, Texas.

What it can do...
It's a house that turns on the bathroom lights for me - bright during the day, but very dim after bedtime. It waters the yard, but not when it's raining. It closes the garage if I forget. It scares off burglars and pages me immediately if it's unsuccessful. It keeps me from having to get up and turn out the lights before bed or when I'm leaving. It turns the lights one when someone enters a room and turns them off when they leave. It talks, it listens, it E-mails. It's controllable through the web, by speech over microphone, or via wireless remote control. It even does what it should, most of the time. And that's not all! Sounds far-fetched? It really isn't. Everything needed to pull this off is readily available, and cheap, and if tied together properly can produce some pretty impressive results.For those of you that would like to see some of this stuff in action, I have made portions of the system available for guests, so you can see it without interfering with me. You can click some lights, view some webcams and check the weather. In the SmartHouse section you will find exteansive detail on how I put this smart house together.

How it does it... and how YOU can do it...
The system is controlled by a single Pentium PC, and the control functionality is provided by a killer home automation application: HomeSeer, by Keware Technologies. This software allows a PC to monitor and command X10 devices which control the lights and appliances around the house. All the web, weather, paging, speech, speech recognition, and other functions are all tied to the system by HomeSeer. Simple, really. No kidding.

Picture
[Home] [SmartHouse] [New Projects] [Resources]