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 link on this blog to Amazon, regardless of whether you’re ordering the actual product being linked to – you’re just saying “Matt sent me to buy something from you guys”!

But this post isn’t just a shameless shill for Amazon: I had a great experience with them recently and wanted to share. I’ve got a bunch of projects going on at the moment, and one of them is automating a sprinkler system for a garden I’ve built, which I’ll feature in a future post.

Some of the parts I ordered didn’t arrive, even though Amazon’s order tracker said they did. So I contacted Amazon support via IM (no phone calls or ridiculously long hold times!), explained the situation, and a very friendly representative named Maria helped me out. She looked into the report and found that she was able to re-send some of the items but had to cancel the order of others (giving me a refund and letting me re-order).

The experience was stellar, and the order was even shipped with overnight shipping rather than the two-day shipping I usually get with my Amazon Prime account. It’s that kind of experience that keeps me from recommending smarthome.com, which has a less-than-stellar return policy and some occasionally onerous shipping costs.

Posted by Matt Chiste

May 6

Tagged with: amazon, garden, prime, sprinkler
Posted in Other

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 using SSL are possibly vulnerable.

One thing you might not have considered yet is whether this bug affects SSL traffic on your ISY-994i, the entry point to your entire home’s automation system. The good news is that the answer appears to be NO: you are safe from this bug with your ISY994i. Read more ›

Posted by Matt Chiste

May 3

Tagged with: heartbleed, isy-994i, ssl
Posted in ISY-994i, Security

Change XBMC Audio Offset for better viewing experience on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi makes for a crazy-cheap media center running XBMC, but it’s not all that powerful and occasionally struggles with HD video. Particularly when combining HD MPG video with multi-channel audio, you may find that occasionally people’s lips (video) don’t match their voice (audio) quite right.

The solution is pretty simple: XBMC has a feature to tweak the audio offset, allowing you to better synch up the audio and video. When watching a video, click the menu button and navigate to the audio settings:
Read more ›

Posted by Matt Chiste

April 30

Tagged with: hack, raspberry pi, xbmc
Posted in Media

Tiny SanDisk Cruzer Fit moves files easily in a tiny package

I visited my parents last weekend and helped out with the usual tech support stuff, including putting movies and music on the XBMC/Apple TV and dealing with a full hard drive on one of their laptops.

The solution for all of these tasks turned out to be my trusty SanDisk Cruzer Fit:
Read more ›

Posted by Matt Chiste

April 26

Tagged with: cruzer, disk, sandisk, usb
Posted in Media

Moves is a great personal activity tracker

Quantified Self, or Lifelogging, is all about being able to capture and record information about yourself, such as weight, activity/sleep, and location.

After Google Latitude shut down, I went looking for an alternative to capture my location all the time, with the intent of building geo-location into my home automation system. It turned out that MobiLinc’s geo-fence feature met all those needs, but I’m still a huge fan of the Moves App:

The Moves App is great because not only does it do an excellent job of tracking your various activity types and locations, it has a great API for extracting that data for future reference. The data is great to see where you’ve been on a particular date, and I’m working on finding ways to incorporate this into my home automation system even further than geo-fencing. For example, based on the actual activity that I’m engaged in, the home automation system will be able to better understand how long it will be before I arrive home to adjust the thermostat at the appropriate time. Read more ›

Posted by Matt Chiste

April 22

Tagged with: intellihome, location, moves, quantified self
Posted in App

The Spark Core is going to be awesome for Home Automation projects

I’ve got my share of Arduino and Netduino devices that I’ve always planned on integrating somehow in my home automation projects, but never really got around to doing so because there really wasn’t any good way to integrate them with my Insteon-automated home.

Now there’s a new device coming out that’s already blown the lid off its Kickstarter campaign, and is shipping in the next week or two: the Spark Core from Spark Devices:

This thing is going to be perfect for one project in particular that I’ll be writing about over the summer (automating my blinds), for a couple of reasons:

It has WIFI. Originally I was planning on using an Arduino coupled with an Insteon IOLinc to receive input and output from my Insteon network, but this bad boy has Wifi, so I’ll be able to send signals to it via the Network Module on the ISY994i.
It’s TINY. Smaller than the “standard” Arduino (although, to be fair, it looks to be about the same size as the Arduino Micro), this will fit in all kinds of small spaces, such as a single gang electric box.
It has a ton of input and output pins. This single device has 8 analog and 8 digital input/output pins, allowing control of multiple things, such as the open/close state of several sets of window blinds.
It’s got a revolutionary way to program it. No longer needing to be tethered to a computer (especially nice when it’s installed behind a wall switch or within the housing of window blinds), it leverages the Spark Cloud and iOS/Android Apps for out-of-the-box reading/writing to the device – and it’s fully compatible with Arduino code for a lower learning curve with the same existing flexibility and power.

So, yeah, I’m pretty excited about this thing. The rest of the hardware is all ready to go – stay tuned for additional posts on this project once the device ships! Read more ›

Posted by Matt Chiste

April 17

Tagged with: arduino, automate blinds, isy-994i, spark core, wifi
Posted in Electrical

Add an SSL certificate to your ISY-994i for secure home automation

If you’re not using something like MobiLinc Connect to remotely access your home automation system, it’s likely that you’ve created a personal domain name, and maybe even secured the connection to your home network with free VPN software with DD-WRT. But it’s a bit of a pain to start up a VPN connection on your phone just to check if you left any lights on. You really shouldn’t open up your ISY-994i to the Internet out-of-the-box with just the default password security, because that user name and password can be picked up by the bad guys on insecure networks. Fortunately, there’s a way to get the best of both worlds with SSL: encrypt all the traffic (including your user name and password) to the ISY994i but not have to start a VPN connection every time you want to do something. You can do this for no cost by using what’s called a “self-signed certificate”, but that means you’re likely to get a browser warning every time you try to access your ISY via a web browser. Instead let’s look at the process for creating an SSL certificate from a trusted certificate authority like GoDaddy.

The process for setting up an SSL certificate isn’t obvious if you’re using the default interface to the ISY, but is reasonably well-documented here. The trick is that you need to load a java applet from Universal Devices that will connect to your ISY locally, with a URL like http://isy.universal-devices.com/994i/4.1.2/dashboard.jnlp (the 4.1.2 in the URL needs to match the firmware version you’re using). One thing I noticed was that, after installing java, clicking the link in my browser tried to download a .jnlp file rather than run it. The solution was to associate .jnlp files with the Java WebStart executable (javaws.exe).

Basically you’re going to:

Log in to the ISY994i dashboard interface
Go to network settings and generate a CSR, or Certificate Signing Request
Use that CSR to purchase an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority (in our case, GoDaddy)
Import the purchased certificate to the ISY994i
Open up your firewall to allow 443 traffic through to the ISY
Connect remotely using https:// instead of http://