RoboHouse

By Andrew Turner

My house is a robot. It thinks, reacts, predicts, and informs. Throughout the day it lets me know how its inhabitants are doing and takes care of all the little things I forget. If I’m worried that I left the front door open or that the heater is turned up too high, I can view my house’s website or RSS feed through a browser or my mobile phone.

In addition to making my life easier, my house is appliance interfaces, or whatever I want to create concerned about saving the planet and my wallet. using the layout tools in Indigo. The Control Pages It can turn off unused appliances and lamps and use a mixture of HTML and JavaScript to create a intelligently control my heating and air conditioning very easy-to-use interface that’s accessible from system according to when someone is home and anywhere in my house, or even at the office or when where it’s coldest or hottest in the house. traveling, using my laptop or mobile phone.

The power my house wields is easy to implement. For controlling lamps and appliances, I use In fact, I rent my house, so all of my additions, modi- a mixture of X10 ( x10.com) and Insteon (insteon. fications, and alterations are temporary. They can net) control modules, available from places like be pulled out tomorrow, and my house would revert smarthome.com or machomestore.com. These to its boring, uninformed structure. modules plug into any 2- or 3-prong wall outlet

The central brain of the house is an Apple and have a unique serial number that Indigo uses PowerMac running Perceptive Automation’s Indigo to address and control.

( perceptiveautomation.com). Indigo is a very powerful I also use a mix of AppleScript, Ruby, and Python and configurable home automation application that scripts for additional intelligence. These scripts allows me to register all my devices, sensors, and are fired off when I come home or leave, to do scripts. Once I input the devices in my house, I can computer backups, start playing music through control them using the provided user interface, or my Squeezebox/SlimServer, or pull down traffic I can create customizable, dynamic “Control Pages” information and display it on my Nabaztag, using my Mac’s web server. These web pages can be a a wi-fi-enabled, programmable, electronic rabbit layout of my house, security camera and status, virtual ( nabaztag.com).

Photography by Greg Ruffing

72 Make: Volume 10