Items Tagged With tutorials

Why automate your lights? Well, to be honest, most of my house is automated, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. There are lots of benefits in automating parts of your house, lighting in particular just makes life easier, lights coming on when you walk into a room is better than switching them on yourself! ....and because they turn themselves on, they turn themselves off too, so you can't forget...

This morning I was primed to settle down to a normal day's work when Chaos on the UK Home Automation IRC Channel mentioned something about "B&Qs HomeEasy automation stuff", and that pretty much put paid to the rest of the morning. We turfed up the website but there was precious little information on there besides the usual marketing guff. So, time for an in-depth review for Automated Home.  Is this the successor to X10 I've been looking for?  Read on to find out and check out the rest of the photos and the video...

Submission by Marcus Warrington - A few weeks ago, on the UKHA email list , we were discussing the X10^2  Micromodules that are available from Kevin Lo in Hong Kong (via eBay). There was some discussion over their ability to be used with latched and momentary switches, with the outcome being that they did work with momentary switches...

Engadget have a great tutorial on building your own solid-state AV switcher...

"In this How-To we'll show you how to wire up your own A/V switcher which you can expand and use any way you'd like, for composite, S-Sideo, component, even VGA signals. Sure, you can buy a newer, really expensive TV's with multiple inputs (even component), but for those of us whose credit cards aren't quite up to that challenge, more inputs for less cash would be rather desirable. Let's get started...

What is a NAS? NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage. Basically just a box with a hard drive (or multiple drives) which plugs into your LAN to provide additional storage which can be accessed by users on the network. Read the full Wikipedia definition...