I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff for my home automation projects and drone hobby, and throwing all the parts into boxes just wasn’t working. So I found two great solutions to keep everything nice and tidy. The first is this…
As you probably know, yesterday Apple announced the new features of iOS 8 due in the fall. There were some interesting features, but of course the one I found most interesting is HomeKit. Details are still wildly vague, but the…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
