En route to a smart home with the Z-Wave protocol
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Whether you want to control your lights or water your house plants remotely, home automation is making inroads into nerd households. Z-Wave technology offers devices for reliable control – a quick Perl script gets you started.
Now that inexpensive mini Linux platforms like the Raspberry Pi are readily available, I can think of dozens of home automation projects I'd love to be working on in the near future. For example, how could I use my cellphone – while out and about – to check whether my surfing wetsuit drying device is still doing its job, and how could I switch it off when all the moisture is out? Is the front door really closed and locked?
I just love to whip up applications like this, and I have explored similar topics in the past. Regular readers may recall the – now somewhat dated – articles on an Internet-controlled power switch [1] and a weather-controlled plant watering system [2].
At the end of the day, the procedure for these and similar applications is always the same: A sensor measures a value, such as brightness or moisture, and reports the values to a controller, which then trips an actuator – say, a relay – which in turn switches on a lamp or a pump. At this point, you may be faced with the problem that the control unit is quite a distance away, and you need a wireless approach to transmitting the signal to the actuator. Or do you really want to have the controlling computer in your plant pot?
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