Monthly Archives: May 2014

Turn off air conditioning when doors are open

Spring is here, which means great weather and open doors or windows. In the past, the routine has been “Open door, close screen door, turn off air conditioning”. But with an Insteon-controlled thermostat and door/window sensors, the third part of

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 26

The Google Smart Home Infographic

Back in January in covering some neat home automation technology at CES, I talked briefly about Nest and Google’s recent acquisition of the company. Flash forward a couple of months, and I get a message from Brandy at forrent.com asking

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 22

Replacing Insteon devices in the ISY994i

Occasionally Insteon devices go bad. It’s not an often occurrence, but when it does happen there’s more to the replacement than just swapping out physical gear: you also need to update the links table of associated devices and scenes, and

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 18

Put your house to sleep at day’s end

After a long day, who can be bothered to remember to turn off lights or lock the doors? Fortunately it’s easy to automate this with Insteon and some simple programs in the ISY-994i. The concept behind this is pretty simple:

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 14

Ideaspace from a drones-eye view

I’m starting to hit the limit of what I can build into my Insteon home automation system with off-the-shelf parts, and have started some more aggressive builds with the 3D printer and Spark Core – but even then there’s a

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 10

Thank you, Amazon

As I’ve made clear since this blog launched last year, this blog is partially supported with my Amazon Affiliate account, which pays a referral fee for sending customers to Amazon. You can support this blog by simply following any Amazon

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 6

ISY-994i is not vulnerable to the HeartBleed bug

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with the SSL Heartbleed bug in my day job pretty aggressively. The bug is a serious one and likely affects you in your daily Internet browsing, as any “secure” internet connections

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 3
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