MisterHouse is an active, community-driven, open source home automation project
The explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies has renewed interest in a topic that has actually been percolating within the hacker subculture for years: home automation. Why not let your computer serve as a "brain" for your house, turning on and off light switches, adjusting the thermostat, or opening the curtains at the perfect time of day to optimize passive solar energy. Creative coders have been asking themselves these questions since long before the first Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards fell into the hands of amateur home designers.
One tool that has been around for many years as an aid for home automation is a practical and easy-to-learn utility called MisterHouse. MisterHouse offers a structure, and a simple user interface, for Perl scripts that provide home automation functions. You need to know a little about Perl programming to use MisterHouse, but you don't need to be an expert in electronic circuits or embedded systems programming.
Bruce Winter first released MisterHouse to the Usenet newsgroup: comp.home.automation on April 1, 1999. MisterHouse started out as a way for Bruce to manage the environment of his passive solar and south-facing, earth-bermed home. He also built custom curtain controllers, which MisterHouse controlled while monitoring sunlight level, outdoor temperature, and indoor temperature to control the curtains, fans, and a furnace.
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