Items Tagged With links

Hi, I've just launched my own site about Home Automation. Its not finished yet, but will have pictures of wiring,etc and maybe some tutorials and reviews. Its mainly about Wiring, Security and Home Cinema...

"Having several pairs of speakers around the house for TTS announcements (using HomeSeer) and background music from my Home automation PC seemed like a nice idea. I started out with a Y splitter and 2 sets of amplified PC sepeakers but I needed a way to selectively turn the speakers on and off.

While browsing the HomeSeer forums I came across a link to a site describing how to build a CCTV camera switcher. This circuit uses a PC parallel port to operate switching transistors. I figured with a bit of tweaking I could use this principal to switch the output from a sound card to several pairs of amplified speakers"...

I've been interested in home automation for a while. The concept of an intelligent house, where devices could be controlled remotely, and would be automated for both comfort and energy efficiency was very appealing. I initially followed developments of some aspects of both the future looking developments from places such as BT Labs, and MIT's Media Lab and their Things that think programme and Project Oxygen, and thought that if I wanted the level of home control that some of their futuristic looking projects provided, I'd be slaving over a soldering iron to build things myself. Two things happened to change this...